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Daily Thoughts. 



BISHOP BROOKS. 



DAILY THOUGHTS 



FROM 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 

LATE BISHOP OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



WITH AN ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE BY THE VENERABLE 
ARCHDEACON FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S. 



TDK jOiBS 

BALTIMORE : 
R. H. WOODWARD & COMPANY. 

13 



&K 






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ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

AN ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE, BY THE VEN. ARCHDEACON 
FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S. 

TT was with a shock of grief that I read in the 
** American telegrams of January 23 the an- 
nouncement of the death of my most dear and 
honored friend, Phillips Brooks. When I parted 
from him at the end of last July it seemed im- 
mensely more likely that I — five years his senior 
— should be called 

"To where beyond these voices there is peace," 

than that he should pass away so suddenly from 
the scene of his splendid activities. He was a 
man of magnificent physique — six feet five high 
and strong and large in proportion. His hand- 
some features, his manly carriage, his striking 
and massive head, his strong health, his vigorous 



vni estimate: and tribute of 

personality, seemed to promise a long life to him 
if to any man. Every one, indeed, noticed dur- 
ing his last visit to England that he looked much 
thinner than he had done two years before, but 
he always spoke of himself as perfectly well, and 
his great boyish heart seemed as full as ever of 
love and hope and joy. I noticed in him a just 
perceptible deepening of gravity in tone, but no 
diminution of his usually bright spirits. He 
resembled our common friend, the late Dean 
Stanley, in the fact that his genius had all the 
characteristics of " the heart of childhood taken 
up and matured in the powers of manhood." I 
attributed the slightly less buoyant temperament 
of last summer — the sort of half-sadness which 
sometimes seemed to flit over his mind, like the 
shadow of a summer cloud— to the exigencies 
and responsibilities of his recent dignity. 

For his work as a Bishop was to the last degree 
exhausting. He used to send me the printed list 
of his engagements. They were daily and in- 



PHIUJPS BROOKS. IX 

cessarit. I stood amazed at them. They were, 
no doubt, greatly increased by his unprecedented 
popularity with the laity ; but to discharge them as 
he would discharge them must have required, and 
must, I fear, have impaired, a giant's strength. 
And this tax upon his powers, joined to the stress 
of a winter which has been terribly severe in 
America, must have hastened the end, which is 
for him so happy a release, but which to us seems 
so untimely a deprivation. 

I cannot but think that if he had not accepted 
the call to the Bishopric of Massachusetts he 
might have lived for many a long and happy 
year. Assuredly it was not ambition which led 
him to desire such empty shadows as precedence 
and a title. I knew him too well to suppose that 
he would care a broken straw for such gilt frag- 
ments of potsherd, such dust in the midnight, as 
the worldly adjuncts of an inch-high distinction. 
His heart was too large for so small an ambition. 
Had he chosen to answer the world according to 



X ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE OE 

its idols, to trim his sails to the veering breezes 
of ecclesiastical opinion, to suppress or tamper 
with his cherished convictions, and, as Tennyson 
says, "to creep and crawl in the hedge-bottoms/ ' 
he, with his rich gifts, might easily have been a 
Bishop thirty years ago. In ability and every 
commanding quality he towered head and shoul- 
ders above the whole body of American eccles- 
iastics, only one or two of whom are known out- 
side their own parishes or dioceses. Probably no 
severer lot could have befallen him than to be 
made Bishop. For he was a man who had lived 
a very happy life, and although he was in no 
sense of the word indolent, he managed to escape 
the entanglements of work which so disas- 
trously crowd the lives of too many of us, not 
only with harassing labors but also with endless 
worry, fussy littlenesses and an infinite deal of 
nothing. Wisely and rightly he left a margin to 
his life, and did not crowd its pages to the very 
edge. He enjoyed his quiet smoke and hour of 



PHIIJJPS BROOKS. XI 

social geniality in the evening. He had an 
insatiate love for travel. He had visited much 
of what was best worth seeing in both hemis- 
pheres, and wherever he went — being blessed 
with admirable taste and ample means — he col- 
lected memorials of his journeys. His bachelor 
home in Boston — in which I twice spent happy 
weeks — was full of careless beauty and solid com- 
fort and was constantly brightened with the 
presence of friends who loved him as few men 
have been ever loved. His Episcopate must 
have greatly altered the peaceful and joyous tenor 
of his life. It must have exposed him to hun- 
dreds of small vexations, which as they revealed 
to him the inherent littleness of mankind — 
especially as it displays itself in spheres ecclesias- 
tical — must have put a severe strain on his faith 
in human nature. I believe that he accepted his 
so-called promotion solely for two reasons — 
because he felt that to do so was a solemn duty 
laid upon him, and because he hoped by this 



xii estimate: and tribute of 

self-sacrifice — not only of wealth and ease, but of 
things which he valued far more than both — to 
render real, high and most needful services to 
the church to which he belonged. I do not 
know that he was right. No man could do the 
work he has done and was doing, but much 
smaller men could have discharged the more 
ordinary functions of his new routine. 

The following letter will show some of his feel- 
ings on his new appointment : 



3N,| 



233 Clarendon Street, Boston, 
May 19, 1891. 

Dear Dr. Farrar : A thousand thanks for your most 
kind letter. I knew that I should have your sympathy ! 

I am not Bishop yet. We have a complicated constitu- 
tion, and all the Diocesses and all the Bishops have to vote " 
upon me before I am confirmed and can be consecrated. 
And so it will be some time yet ; but it will come. Massa- 
chusetts has done its part, rather unexpectedly to every- 
body, and I shall probably be consecrated somewhere 
about October 1. It looks quite interesting and attractive, 
and I hope I shall not be quite useless in the new work 
which will occupy the remainder of my days. I have had 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. Xlll 

a delightful life, and the last twenty years of it which I have 
spent in Trinity Church have been unbroken in their happi- 
ness. Why should I believe that the good Father has left me 
now, and has not made ready something good for me to do 
and be in these new fields ? So I go on with good heart. 

It will spoil any chance of my coming this year to 
Europe, and so I must not hope to preach in St. Marga- 
ret's. A quiet summer here at home, looking over the 
work, closing up the past and making ready for the 
future, is what evidently is appointed me. I am sorry 
for that. I do not like to let the years go by with so rare 
sights of friends' faces. And it will be long since I saw 
yours — another year, perhaps. 

You know how constantly I think of you, and with 
what wonder and admiration I hear of your abounding 
labors, and with what deep sorrow I know of suffering 
that comes to you ! It is a joy to me that you should put 
my name in your new book. It touches me and pleases 
me exceedingly. 

And so, dear friend, may God's best blessing be to you 
and yours. My truest love to them. 

And let me be always, 

Affectionately your friend, 

Phillips Brooks. 



xiv estimate and tribute of 

Whether, in addition to other trials, he suffered 
much from the malevolence of his opponents— 
whether he was in the slightest degree moved by 
reading such articles as that which was quoted in 
the last number of this Review, in which the 
Church Times, with its usual exquisite amenity 
and that beautiful exhibition of the elementary 
Christian graces by which (in addition to infalli- 
bility) it is characterized — I do not know. I 
think and hope that he was indifferent to what 
Montalembert calls "the unknown voices that 
bellow in the shade, and swell the language of 
falsehood and of hate." What I do know is that 
in the cause of duty he feared, as little as I do 
myself, to encounter the daggers of masked 
" religious " calumniators. If he had to pass 
through veritable hurricanes of abuse from anony- 
mous critics, he could always turn from the storm 
without to the sunshine of "pure conscience 
within ; ' ' and he knew that he was enshrined in 
the enthusiastic affection of tens of thousands of 



PHILIPS BROOKS. XV 

the brother Christians whom he had so nobly 
served. 

I never knew a man so supremely unaffected 
by the 

" Status, entourage- worldly circumstance " 

of his episcopal rank. It was with difficulty that 
I persuaded him to wear in England his episcopal 
robes, though any ordinary surplice looked ridi- 
culous on his massive frame. Once when I gave 
the title, "my Lord," to dear old Bishop Lee, of 
Delaware — then, I think, the Presiding American 
Bishop — with whom I was staying, he quietly 
said, "You are giving me, sir, a title to which I 
have no claim/ ' What Phillips Brooks would 
have done to me had I so addressed him I can 
hardly conjecture. I knew him too well to 
make the attempt. I have experienced in the 
case of more than one man that when he becomes 
a Bishop under the modern circumstances and 
surroundings of that position, if he does not quite 



xvi ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE OF 

" Bestride the narrow world 
Like a Colossus," 

yet all the old familiar friendship is utterly at an 
end. But his elevation did not make one atom 
of difference in the case of Phillips Brooks. To 
the last he was the dear, frank, manly, noble 
Phillips Brooks, as humble, as cordial as ever. 
He was too truly great to be merged in small 
superiorities. All artificiality and all pretence 
and all looking down upon others were to him im- 
possible. Marcus Aurelius had to say to himself, 
" Do not be Caesarized. ' ' But Phillips Brooks 
had no need of the warning not to be puffed up. 
He was immensely greater than his bishopric. He 
was too much of a man to be lost in the ecclesias- 
tic. He did not develop that excess of caution 
which leads some men to measure their words as 
though they were the answers of art oracle, and 
makes others so self-conscious and timid that they 

u Dare not with too confident a tone 
Proclaim the nose upon their face their own.'-' 



PHIUJPS BROOKS. XV11 

Such greatness as Phillips Brooks had lay in his 
true, large-hearted manhood ; and his manhood 
was too supreme to be artificialized into pom- 
posity and euphuisms. 

The letter which he wrote to me on December 
13, his fifty-seventh and last birthday, lies before 
me. I print it here, omitting only a few words 
which his great kindness spoke. How strangely 
the words read to me, "I pray you to live ! " 
The greater and the better is taken ; the feebler 
and less worthy is left. 



r, Boston, 1 

3, 1892. J 



233 Clarendon Street, 
Tuesday, December 13, 

My Dear Archdeacon : It is partly that I want to 
send you Christmas greeting, and partly that I need your 
sympathy to-day when I am fifty-seven years old — for 
these two reasons and a hundred others I am going to fill 
these four pages with talk with you across the water. 

In the midst of a thousand useless things which I do 
every day there is always coming up the recollection of 
last summer, and how good you were to me, and what en- 
2 



xviii ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE OF 

joyment I had in those delightful idle days. Never shall 
I cease to thank you for taking me to Tennyson's, and 
letting me see the great dear man again. How good he 
was that day ! Do you remember how he read those two 
stanzas about " Faith," which he had just written ? I 
can hear his great voice booming in them as I read them 
over in the new volume which has come since the poet 
died. And how perfect his death was ! And how one 
feels that he has brooded so on death, and grown familiar 
with its mystery on every side, that it cannot have come 
with surprise to him ! And Whittier, too, is gone. He 
never forgot the visit which you paid him, nor ceased to 
speak of it whenever I saw him. But how strange it 
seems, this writing against one friend's name after another 
that you will see his face no more ! I pray you to live, for 
to come to London and not see you there, what should I 
care for the old places, St. Margaret's, and the Abbey, and 
the Dean's Yard, and all the rest ? 

I hope you know how I valued the sermons which I 
heard from you in the Abbey on those Sunday afternoons 
last summer. They have been in my ears and in my heart 
ever since. Indeed, when I look back over these years, I 
owe you very much indeed. 

I hope that you are very well and happy. Do not let 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. XIX 

the great world trouble you, but be sure that many are 
rejoicing in your brave work. 

O, that you were here to-night ! With all best Christ- 
mas wishes for Mrs. Farrar and you and your children, 
I am, affectionately your friend, 

Phillips Brooks. 



I first made his acquaintance about 16 years 
ago. He called on me in Dean's Yard with his 
brother. He brought no introduction, but 
kindly came of his own accord to make my ac- 
quaintance. I asked Dean Stanley to appoint 
him to preach in the Abbey, and he preached 
on that occasion the sermon on "The Candle of 
the Lord'' which attracted such wide attention. 
He had not then published any volume of ser- 
mons. I urged him to do so, and he complied, 
naming the volume from the sermon by which 
we had all been struck. That was the beginning 
of many years of close friendship. His first visit 
when he came to England was generally to my 



XX ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE OF 

house, and his first sermons were at St. Margaret's 
and the Abbey. 

We in England were, of course, less familiar 
with his voice, and less able to catch his im- 
mensely rapid intonations than our American 
brethren. It was not only the rush of words 
which rendered it difficult to follow him, but the 
rush of thoughts. The two together made him 
the despair of reporters. Dean Stanley used to 
compare him to an express train going to its 
appointed terminus with majestic speed, and 
sweeping every obstacle, one after another, out 
of his course. I once tried to induce him to 
adopt a more measured utterance. He told me 
that for him it was absolutely impossible. In 
youth he had suffered from something resembling 
an impediment in his speech, and he could only 
preach rapidly, or not at all. He was supremely 
devoid of all self-consciousness in the pulpit. 
When an American clergyman was deploring to 
him the emptiness of many American churches, 



PHILIPS BROOKS. XXI 

he said, with the utmost simplicity, that it must 
be quite a mistake, for wherever he preached he 
founded all the churches quite full. It does not 
seem to have occurred to him that it was his 
name and fame and singular influence which at- 
tracted such large multitudes wherever he was 
announced to preach. 

He has given us his views on preaching in his 
published lectures on the subject. The value of 
his own sermons lay in their genuine manliness, 
their sincerity of conviction, their freshness and 
originality, their unity and directness of thought 
their classic diction, and their brilliant illustra- 
tions. They contain sentences which, when we 
have once read them, we never forget. 

He generally preferred to read his sermons, 
but he could preach equally well extempore, and 
that without a note. Indeed, if the hearer shut 
his eyes, he would have been unable to say 
whether Phillips Brooks —as all Americans loved 
to call him to the last — was preaching a written 



XXII ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE OF 

or an unwritten sermon; he preached his old 
sermons with as little reluctance as Dr. Chalmers. 
I noticed on his MSS. that, even in his own 
church, he often repeated the same sermon within 
four years of its delivery. So far from resenting 
this, his vast congregation liked it, and asked him 
to preach again and again the same sermon. " I 
am so glad that he preached that sermon at St. 
Margaret's/ ' said an American lady to me. " It 
is a special favorite of ours at Boston." 

In the present phase of ecclesiastical opinion, 
what is called "Catholicity" is apparently re- 
garded as identical with intolerance. It takes 
its tones from the Papacy, and feebly echoes its 
anti-Christian haughtiness and empty anathemas. 
He in these days is supposed to be the best 
"Catholic" and the most faithful "Churchman" 
who turns his back most contumeliously on his 
Christian brethren who are not of the same fold 
as himself, and shows the greatest amount of 
hesitation even in handing them over to the 



PHILIPS BROOKS. XX111 

possibility of " uncovenanted mercies." The 
Christianity of Phillips Brooks was not of this 
narrow, repellent, sacerdotal, and Popish type. 
He deliberately and constantly committed the 
crime, so unpardonable in the eyes of the new 
tyranny, of regarding all his fellow- Christians, to 
whatever denomination they belonged, as no less 
honest, and no less dear to God than himself — 
as the heirs with him of the common mysteries 
of redemption and immortality, the children 
with him of a common Father, the redeemed 
with him of a common Saviour, the sheep with 
him of one flock, though in different folds, 
fellow-heirs with him of a common and unex- 
clusive heaven. Like Henri Peyrreve, he hated 
to see churches make their gates bristle with 
razors and anathemas. He would have said, with 
St. Irenseus, Ubi Christus ibi Ecclesia-. He did 
not explain away the plain words of Christ : 
" Where two or three are gathered together in 
My name, there am I in the midst of them." 



xxiv ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE OF 

He had not ceased to attach any meaning to the 
words, " When Thou hadst overcome the sharp- 
ness of death, Thou didst open the kingdom of 
Heaven to all believers." He would have said 
with the Abbess Angelique Arnauld, "I am of 
the Church of all the saints, and all the saints 
are of my Church." Where he saw the fruits of 
the Spirit he was convinced of the presence of 
the Spirit, and no loud assertion made him be- 
lieve that that Spirit was present in factions 
which yield only the fruits of bitterness, and are 
chiefly conspicuous for the broad phylacteries of 
uncharitable arrogance. 

Religious animosity might bark at his heels, 
but he was so inherently noble in himself that it 
did not make him lose his faith, his hope, his 
love, his courage, nor did it ever cause him to 
swerve a hair's breadth from the inflexible line 
on which he saw that his duty lay. And he had 
his reward. His opponents will subside into 
their native insignificance and be forgotten^ ex- 



PHILIPS BROOKS. XXV 

cept so far as the accident of connecting them- 
selves with his name will preserve them from 
oblivion. His name will live for many a long 
year as the name of the foremost of all American 
ecclesiastics of this generation ; as the name of a 
man whose manhood and whose sweet and lofty 
character won, and as Americans would say, 
"magnetized" to an unprecedented extent, all 
true hearts. Outside of sacerdotal cliques, every 
one knew, every one admired, every one loved 
Phillips Brooks. He was the common property, 
the common enthusiasm of the great American 
nation. The great writers of America recog^- 
nized him, and him only among clerics, as their 
intellectual peer. At his house, and at the 
Saturday Club, I have dined with Mr. Lowell 
and Dr. O. W. Holmes, and many of the Ameri- 
cans who were foremost in literary, scientific and 
political circles, and he was always the favorite of 
all. The venerable Quaker poet, J. G. Whittier, 
treated him like a brother. In all this his life 



xxvi ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE OF 

was very enviable, but perhaps most of all in the 
influence which he wielded over the hearts of 
young men. I was with him at Harvard, at Yale, 
at Portland, at Syracuse, and at other American 
schools and universities. As the guest and 
stranger, it always fell to me to address those 
eager young students ; but when I had finished, 
if Phillips Brooks was with me on the platform, 
''the boys" always shouted for him, and would 
not leave off till he had said a few words to them. 
Often what he said was perfectly simple, and was 
in no way striking. I do not remomber the 
topic of his little speeches any more than I re- 
member my own, but when he had spoken to 
them "the boys" were always satisfied, for they 
always felt that they had been listening to a man. 
Nothing was more remarkable in him than his 
royal optimism. With him it was a matter of 
faith and temperament. He had not had to. fight 
his way into it as, perhaps, Browning had — whom 
among other great Englishmen I had the plea- 



PHILIPS BROOKS. XXVU 

sure of introducing to him. I think he must have 
been born an optimist. But often, when I was 
inclined to despond, his conversation, his bright 
spirits, his friendliness, his illimitable hopes came 
to me like a breath of vernal air. He rejoiced 
to have been born in this century because of its 
large outlook ; and when he became godfather to 
one of my grandchildren, he wrote that the chil- 
dren were to be envied whose lot would be cast 
in an epoch which he believed would be rendered 
glorious by discoveries and progress even more 
memorable than those which have marked our 
own. 

He is gone. He has left the world much 
poorer for his loss. All that is best, every ele- 
ment that is not ignoble in the American church, 
has special cause to grieve his irreparable loss. 
There is not one ecclesiastic in America whose 
death could cause anything like so deep a sor- 
row, or create anything like so immense a void. 
Would to God that we had a few men such as he 



XXV111 ESTIMATE AND TRIBUTE OF 

in the English church. I have known many- 
men — even not a few clergymen — of higher 
genius, of far wider learning, of far more bril- 
liant gifts. But I never met any man, or any 
ecclesiastic, half so natural, so manly, so large- 
hearted, so intensely Catholic in the only real 
sense, so loyally true in his friendships, so abso- 
lutely unselfish, so modest, so unartificial, so self- 
forgetful. He is gone, and I for one never hope 
to look upon his like again. To have known 
him, to have been honored by his friendship, to 
have witnessed his noble life and his large aspira- 
tions, consoles me much. It is in itself "a. 
liberal education.' ' And now that his lot is 
among the saints, who would wish him back 
amid all the pettiness and baseness and strife of 
tongues, which are, alas ! quite as common in 
the nominal Church as in the authentic world ? 
A blessing and a gracious presence has vanished 
out of many lives. With a very sad heart I bid 
him farewell and lay this "shadow of a wreath of 



PHILIPS BROOKS. XXIX 

lilies ' ' on the fresh grave of the noblest, truest 
and most stainless man I ever knew.* 

* By the kind permission of the editors of the (i Review 
of Reviews " we are enabled to give this estimate and tri- 
bute of Bishop Brooks. 



DAILY THOUGHTS. 



January i. 

Wrll you let Christ tell you what is the perfect 
man ? Will you let Him set His simplicity and 
graciousness close to your life, and will you feel 
their power ? Oh ! be brave, be true, be pure, 
be men, be men in the power of Jesus Christ. 
May God bless you ! May God bless you ! 

January 2. 

Men have found what Jesus was perpetually 
declaring, what Jesus was more and more declar- 
ing as He came into the fuller consciousness of 
His own life, that in Him and His experience, 
in His soul, there lay the solution of every prob- 
lem, the enlightenment of every darkness — the 
darknesses which should yet arise, the darknesses 
which are to come as men move into fuller light. 
For it is the law of progress that as men move 
3 S 



6 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

into the light they realize more fully the measure 
of darkness which lies about them, and feel the 
need of still richer truths to lead them into the 
light which lies beyond. 

January 3. 

Shall there be no Christ for the strong men 
who have before them the duties of their life, 
and who want the strength with which to do 
them ? Shall there be no Christ for the young 
men, the young men standing in danger, but 
also standing in such magnificent and splendid 
chances ? It is great to think of Christ standing 
by the sorrowing and comforting them. It is 
great, — we will not say it is greater, — it is very 
great, when by the side of the young man just 
entering into life there stands the Christ, saying 
to his soul, with the voice that he cannot fail to 
hear : " Be pure, be strong, be wise, be independ- 
ent ; rejoice in Me and My appreciation. Let 
the world go, if it is necessary that the world 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 7 

should go. Serve the world, but do not be the 
servant of the world. Make the world your ser- 
vant by helping the world in every way in which 
you can minister to its life. Be brave, be strong, 
be manly by My strength." 

January 4. 

The purpose and result of freedom is service. 
It sounds to us at first like a contradiction, like a 
paradox. Great truths very often present them- 
selves to us in the first place as paradoxes, and it 
is only when we come to combine the two differ- 
ent terms of which they are composed and see 
how it is only by their meeting that the truth 
does reveal itself to us, that the truth does become 
known. It is by this same truth that God frees 
our souls, not from service, not from duty, but 
into service and into duty, and he who makes 
mistakes the purpose of his freedom mistakes the 
character of his freedom. 



8 SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

January 5. 

The highest conception of the state, as of the 
world, is that it is an uttered thought of God, a 
certain colossal utterance of truth. 

January 6. 

Duty has become to us such a hard word, ser- 
vice has become to us a word so full of the spirit 
of bondage, that it surprises us at the first 
moment when we are called upon to realize that 
it is in itself a word of freedom. And yet we 
constantly are lowering the whole thought of our 
being, we are bringing down the greatness and 
richness of that with which we have to deal, until 
we recognize that God does not call us to our 
fullest life simply for ourselves. 

We know it at once if we turn to Him who 
represents the fulness of the nature of our hu- 
manity. 

January 7. 

Let your eye be upon the light which, through 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 9 

every jungle, will beat its way to the soul that is 
looking for it, and show that soul that it essentially 
belongs to God. 

January 8. 

The great question that is on men's minds to- 
day, as I believe it has never been upon men's 
minds before, is this : Is this Christian religion, 
with its high pretensions, this Christian life that 
claims so much for itself, is it competent for the 
task that it has undertaken to do ? Can it meet 
all these human problems, and relieve all these 
human miseries, and fulfil all these human hopes ? 

Christian men, it is for us to give our bit of 
answer to that question. It is for us, in whom 
the Christian Church is at this moment partially 
embodied, to declare that Christianity, that the 
Christian faith, the Christian manhood, can do 
that for the world which the world needs. You 
say, " What can I do?" You can furnish one 
Christian life. You can furnish a life so faithful 
to every duty, so ready for every service, so 



10 SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

determined not to commit every sin, that the 
great Christian Church shall be the stronger for 
your living in it, and the problem of the world 
be answered. 

January 9. 

Oh, this marvellous, this awful power that we 
have over other people's lives ! Oh ! the power 
of the sin that you have done years and years 
ago ! It is awful to think of it. I think there 
is hardly anything more terrible to the human 
thought than this — the picture of a man who, 
having sinned years and years ago in a way that 
involved other souls in his sin, and then, having 
repented of his sin and undertaken another life, 
knows certainly that the power, the consequence 
of that sin is going on outside of his reach, be- 
yond even his ken and knowledge. No steps, 
quickened with all your earnestness, can ' pursue 
it. No contrition can draw back its consequences. 
Remorse cannot force the bullet back again into 
gun from which it once has gone forth. It makes 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. II 

life awful to the man who has ever sinned, who 
has ever wronged and hurt another life because 
of this sin, because no sin ever was done that 
did not hurt another life. 

January 10. 

Thank God that when a man does a bit of 
service, however little it may be, of that too he 
can never trace the consequences. Thank God 
, for that which in some better moment, in some 
nobler inspiration, you did ten years ago to make 
your brother's faith a little more strong. To estab- 
lish the purity of a soul instead of staining it and 
shaking it, thank God, in this quick, electric 
atmosphere in which we live, that, too, runs 
forth. Do not say in your terror, "I will do 
nothing.' ' You must do something. Only let 
Christ tell you — let Christ tell you that there is 
nothing that a man rests upon in the moment, 
that he thinks of, as he looks back upon it when 
it has sunk into the past, with any satisfaction, 



12 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

except some service to his fellow-men, some 
strengthening and helping of a human soul. 

January n. 

That is the Christian life, the following of Jesus 
Christ. 

January 12. 

God wastes no history. In every age and every 
land He is working for the elucidation of some 
moral truth, some riper culture for the character 
of man. 

January 13. 

Christianity has not yet been tried. My 
friends, no man dares to condemn the Christian 
faith to-day, because the Christian faith has not 
been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought 
that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving 
them from suffering and pain, not until they get 
the grand idea of it as the great power of God 
present in and through the lives of men, not until 
then does Christianity enter upon its true trial 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 13 

and become ready to show what it can do. 
Therefore, we may struggle against our sin in 
order that men may be saved around us, and not 
simply that our own souls may be saved. 

January 14. 

It is impossible, as I have suggested to you 
again and again in what I have been saying, that 
a man can have his mind open to the receipt of 
the truth of a person unless he be a certain kind 
of man himself. I do not know but the basest 
and wickedest man who lives may believe in the 
Copernican theory, or that two and two make 
four, yet I cannot help believing that if he were 
a better and truer man he would believe even 
those truths, outside of himself, of science and 
arithmetic, more fully and deeply. Men were 
not all astray in the first thing that they were 
seeking after, though they were wofully astray in 
many things that they said about it, when they 
talked about faith and works. Faith enters in 



14 SELECTIONS FROM PHIWJPS BROOKS. 

through the soul that does a noble deed, and in 
the coming in of that faith the higher deed be- 
comes possible to him. 

January 15. 

When I turn to Jesus and think of Him as the 
manifestation of His own Christianity — and if 
men would only look at the life of Jesus to see 
what Christianity is, and not at the life of the 
poor representatives of Jesus whom they see 
around them, there would be so much more 
clearness, they would be rid of so many difficul- 
ties and doubts. When I look at the life of 
Jesus I see that the purpose of consecration, 
of emancipation, is service of His fellow-men. 

January 16. 

There is a certain widespread nervousness and 
fear of giving force any true place in the world. 
It seems a horrible intruder, soon, we pray, to be 
cast out. And yet force is as truly the companion 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIUJPS BROOKS. 15 

of reason as body is of spirit. Righteous force 
is the reaction of truth upon opposing matter. 

January 17. 

I cannot think for a moment of Jesus as doing 
that which so many religious people think they 
are doing when they serve Christ, when they 
give their lives to Him. I cannot think of Him 
as simply saving His own soul, living His own 
life, and completing His own nature in the sight 
of God. It is a life of service from beginning 
to end. He gives himself to man because He 
is absolutely the child of God, and He sets up 
service, and nothing but service, to be the ulti- 
mate purpose, the one great desire, on which 
the souls of His followers should be set, as His 
own soul is set, upon it continually. 

January 18. 

That men should be true to their best convic- 
tions, and to their simple duty, this is the bless- 



16 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

ing that gives all blessings with it, and is the 
fountain of all charity and progress. 

January 19. 

He who thinks that he is being released from 
the work, and not set free in order that he may 
accomplish that work, mistakes the Christ from 
whom the freedom comes, mistakes the condition 
into which his soul is invited to enter. 

For if the freedom of a man simply consists 
in the larger opportunity to be and to do all 
that God makes him in His creation capable 
of being and doing, then certainly if man has 
been capable of service it is only by the en- 
trance into service, by the acceptance of that life 
of service for which God has given man the 
capacity, that he enters into the fulness of his 
freedom and becomes the liberated child of 
God. 

January 20. 

Truths are the roots of duties. A rootless 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIWJPS BROOKS. 1 7 

duty, one that has no truth below it out of which 
it grows, has no life, and will have no growth. 

January 21. 

The thing that impresses me more and more is 
this — that we only need to have extended to the 
multitude that which is at this moment present in 
the few, and the world really would be saved. 
There is but the need of the extension into a 
multitude of souls of that which a few souls have 
already attained in their consecration of them- 
selves to human good, and to the service of God, 
and I will not say the millennium would have 
come, but heaven would have come, the new 
Jerusalem would be here. 

January 22. 

The Church has been spread by force, but 
Christianity never. To try to think of extending 
a faith by force is to try to think a contradiction. 
It is like thinking of raising enthusiasm with 



l8 SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

levers, or crushing genius with sledge hammers. 
The tools have no relation to the material or the 
task. 

January 23. 

Any man or any institution which attempts a 
great religious work in behalf of the growing 
generations of a country, must undertake as pre- 
paratory to it, and as a necessary part of it, a 
great moral work as well. A faithful ministry, 
we hold, must not merely declare the Saviour, 
but must attack and beat down those special sins 
which stand in the very doorways and keep the 
Saviour out of the hearts of men. 

January 24. 

It is the joy of service that makes the life of 
Christ, and for us to serve Him, serving fellow- 
man and God — as He served fellow-man and 
God — whether it bring pain or joy, if we can 
only get out of our souls the thought that it 
matters not if we are happy or sorrowful, if only 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 1 9 

we are dutiful and faithful, and brave and strong, 
then we should be in the atmosphere, we should 
be in the great company of the Christ. 

January 25. 
It is not your business and mine to study 
whether we shall get to heaven, even to study 
whether we shall be good men ; it is our business 
to study how we shall come into the midst of the 
purposes of God and have the unspeakable privi- 
lege in these few years of doing something of His 
work. And yet so is our life all one, so is the 
kingdom of God which surrounds us and infolds 
us one bright and blessed unity, that when a man 
has devoted himself to the service of God and 
his fellow-man, immediately he i§^ thrown back 
upon his own nature, and he sees now — it is the 
right place for him to see — that he must be the 
brave, strong, faithful man, because it is impossible 
for him to do his duty and to render his service, 
except it is rendered out of a heart that is full of 
faithfulness, that is brave and true. 



20 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

January 26. 

Thought is not simply the sea upon which the 
world of action rests, but, like the air which per- 
vades the whole solid substance of our globe, it 
permeates and fills it in every part. It is thought 
which gives to it its life. It is thought which 
makes the manifestation of itself in every different 
action of man. I hope we are not so deluded as 
men have been sometimes, as some men are to- 
day, that we shall try to separate these two lives 
from one another, and one man say, " Everything 
depends upon my action, and I care not what I 
think/ ' or, as men have said, at least, in other 
times, " If I think right, it matters not how I 
act." But the right thought and the right action 
make one complete and single man. 

January 27. 

Only when Christianity is a force, only when I 
seek independence of men in serving men, do I 
cease to be a slave to their whims. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 21 

January 28. 

We make very much of free thought in these 
days. Let us always remember that free thought 
means the opportunity to think, and not the 
opportunity not to think. We rejoice in the 
way in which our fathers came to this country 
and in their children perpetuated the purpose of 
their coming, in order that they might have 
freedom to worship God. Do we worship God ? 
Simply to have attained freedom and not to use 
freedom for its true purpose, not to live within 
the world of freedom according to the life which 
is given to us there — that is to do dishonor to the 
freedom, to disown the purpose for which the 
freedom has been given to us. 

January 29. 

Once accept the supreme importance of truth, 
and every part of our nature becomes anxious for 
the preservation of the testimonies of God. The 
4 



22 SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

great doctrines of our faith become the great 
pillars of our life. 

January 30. 

Perfect truth consists not merely in the right 
constituents of character, but in their right and 
intimate conjunction. This union of the mental 
and moral into a life of admirable simplicity is 
what we most admire in children, but in them it 
is unsettled and unpractical. But when it is pre- 
served into a manhood, deepened into reliability 
and maturity, it is that glorified childlikeness, 
that high and reverend simplicity which shames 
and baffles the most accomplished astuteness, and 
is chosen by God to fill his purposes when he 
needs a ruler for his people of faithful and true 

heart. 

January 31. 

Truth and nature are in their very nature 
mighty and intolerant, and must fight with and 
conquer falsehood and sin in any region of this 
many-regioned universe where they may meet. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 23 

February i. 

Christianity is one and everlasting. Its work 
of salvation for man's soul is the same blessed 
work forever. But its relation to the world's 
life at large must be forever changing with the 
changes of that world's needs and seekings. The 
larger applications of Christianity must of neces- 
sity be from time to time readjusted, and in their 
readjustments its power may be temporarily ob- 
scured or unrecognized as it passes into new 
forms of exhibition. 

February 2. 

Through our fathers' wisdom and devotion, we 
must become wiser and more devoted than they. 
Friends, we must rise to thoughts beyond our 
fathers, or we are not our fathers' worthy chil- 
dren. Not to do in our days just what our fathers 
did long ago, but to live as truly up to our light 
as our fathers lived up to theirs, — that is what it 
is to be worthy of our fathers. 



24 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

February 3. 

Men talk about morality as one thing, and re- 
ligion as another. Sometimes they pit them one 
against the other, as if they were some sort of 
natural antagonism between the two. There can 
be no such thing as morality without religion, 
and morality becomes more and more genuine 
just in proportion as religion becomes more and 
more sound and true. We do not believe in any 
reform which finds its whole motive within the 
region of human relations. We look for the 
permanent success of no effort, however noble 
its appointed aim may be, which does not draw 
its impulse from some association of humanity 
with a power and a will above its own. 

February 4. 

Life can only be truly communicated by truly 
living methods. Nothing else will do. This 
takes all power away from mere machineries, from 
the highest to the lowest. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 25 

February 5. 

I know no man's nature finally but by that 
testimony which the nature gives me of him. 
Bring me all evidence that the man is trustworthy, 
and then when I am convinced I will go and 
stand in the presence of that man himself, and he 
shall tell me. So the world stood, so the world 
stands to-day in the presence of Jesus Christ. 
His presence on earth is an historic fact. The 
words that He spoke are written down in a true 
record. The deeds that He did are the history 
of the manifestations of His character, and the 
story of His Christendom is the continued mani- 
festation of His life, the divine life in the life of 
man, made divine through Him. 

February 6. 

Religion is not something that is fastened upon 
the outside of life, but is the awakening of the 
truth inside of life. 



26 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

February 7. 

But what, then, is the Christian religion ? It 
is the simple following of the divine person, 
Jesus Christ, who, entering into our humanity, 
has made evident two things — the love of God 
for that humanity, and the power of that hu- 
manity to answer to the love of God. The one 
thing that the eye of the Christian sees and never 
can lose is that majestic, simple figure, great in 
its simplicity, in its innocence, in its purity and 
in its unworldliness. that walked once on this 
earth and that walks forever through the lives of 
men, showing Himself to human kind, manifest 
in human kind. The power to receive it, the 
divine life wakened in every child of man by the 
divine life manifested in Jesus Christ. That is 
the great Christian faith, and the man becomes a 
Christian in his belief when he assures himself 
that that manifestation of the divine life has been 
made and is perpetually being made, and he 
answers to that appeal of the Christ. 



SELECTIONS EROM PHILIPS BROORS. 2J 

February 8. 
This truth comes to us more and more the 
longer that we live, that on what field or in what 
uniform, or with what aims we do our duty, mat- 
ters very little, or even what our duty is, great or 
small, splendid or obscure. Only to find our 
duty certainly and somewhere, somehow do it 
faithfully, makes us good, strong, happy, and 
useful men, and tunes our lives into some feeble 
echo of the life of God. 

February 9. 

Of the essential life of the Church, of the truly 
living Church, what can we say but this ? That it 
is that which most completely feels that it was 
made for men, not men for it ; which, therefore, 
lives only as it lives in them ; which strives for 
nothing but to open more and more the channels 
of life from Christ to them ? 

February 10. 
I say that only when a man puts himself where 



28 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

he can feel the power of Christ, where it is pos- 
sible for him, if there be a Christ, if Christ be all 
that the Christian religion claims that He is, 
only when a man puts himself where he needs 
and must have and must certainly feel that Christ, 
if there be a Christ, only then has he a right to 
disbelieve if the Christ be not there, only then 
has he a right to believe if the Christ find him 
there. And where is that ? When a man takes 
up the highest duties, when he accepts the 
noblest life, when he lays open his soul to the 
great exactions and obligations which belong to 
him in his spiritual nature, when he tries to be a 
pure man, a devoted man, a noble man, only 
then has he a chance to know that force which 
only then comes into its activity. 

February n. 

Hear the words that Jesus said, words that 
our age must take to itself until it shall be wiser 
than it is to-day : " Blessed are the pure in heart, 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 29 

for they shall see God." " If any man will do 
His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether 
it be of God." Ponder those words, my friends. 
See how reasonable they are. See how r import- 
ant they are. See how they have the secret of 
your own life, of what it is to do, of what it is to 
be, forever and ever sealed up in them. These 
two things, I am sure, are true with regard to the 
method of belief — that no man can ever go for- 
ward to a higher belief until he is true to the 
faith which he already holds. Be the noblest 
man that your present faith, poor and weak and 
imperfect as it is, can make you to be. Live up 
to your present growth, your present faith. So, 
and so only, as you take the next straight step 
forward, as you stand strong where you are now, 
so only can you think the curtain will draw back 
and there will be revealed to you what lies be- 
yond. 

February 12. 

I do not know how any man can stand and plead 



30 S£I,ECTlONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

with his brethren for the higher life, that they 
will enter into and make their own the life of 
Christ and God, unless he is perpetually con- 
scious that around them with whom he pleads 
there is the perpetual pleading and the voice of 
God himself. * * * * But if it be so, that 
God is pleading with every one of His children 
to enter into the highest life ; if it be so. that 
God is making His application and His appeal to 
every soul to know Him, and in Him to know 
himself, then one may plead with earnestness and 
plead with great hopefulness before his brethren. 
And so it is. The great truth of Jesus Christ is 
that, that God is pleading with every soul, not 
merely in the words which we hear from one an- 
other, not merely in the words which we read 
from His book, but in every influence of life ; 
and, in those unknown influences which are 
too subtle for us to understand or perceive, 
God is forever seeking after the souls of His chil- 
dren. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 31 

February 13. 

Believe that the highest you ever have been you 
may be all the time, and vastly higher still if only 
the power of the Christ can occupy you and fill 
your life all the time. 

February 14. 

Only when a man tries to live the divine life 
can the divine Christ manifest Himself to him. 
Therefore the true way for you to find Christ is 
not to go groping in a thousand books. It is not 
for you to try evidences about a thousand things 
that people have believed of Him, but it is for 
you to undertake so great a life, so devoted a life, 
so pure a life, so serviceable a life, that you can- 
not do it exactly by Christ, and then see whether 
Christ helps you. See whether there comes to 
you the certainty that you are a child of God, 
and the manifestation of the child of God be- 
comes the most credible, the most certain thing 
to you in all of history. 



32 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

February 15. 

Man stands separated from that life of God, as 
it were, by a great, thick wall, and every effort 
to put away his sin, to make himself a nobler and 
a purer man, is simply his beating at the inside 
of that door which stands between him and the 
life of God, which he knows that he ought to be 
living. And the glory and trie beauty of it is 
that while he is beating upon the inside of the 
wall there is also a noble power praying upon the 
outside of the wall. The life to which he ought 
to come is striving in its turn, upon its side, to 
break away the hindrance that is keeping him 
from the thing he ought to be, that is keeping 
him from the life he ought to live. God, with 
His sunshine and lightning, with the great 
majestic manifestations of Himself, and with all 
the peaceful exhibitions of His life, is forever 
trying, upon His side of the wall, to break away 
the great barrier that separates the sinner's life 
from Him. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 33 

February 16. 

Can there be anything more winning to the 
soul, anything that brings a deeper shame to you, 
than to have it revealed to you, suddenly or 
slowly, that from the first day that you came into 
this world, nay, before your life was an uttered 
fact in this world, God has been loving you, and 
seeking you, and planning for you, and making 
every effort that He could make in consistency 
with the free will with which He endowed you 
from the centre of His own life, that you might 
become His and therefore might become truly 
yourself? Through all the years in which you 
were obstinate and rebellious, through all the 
years in which you defied Him, nay, through the 
years in which you denied Him and said that He 
did not exist, He was with you all the time. 

February 17. 

Life is the thing we seek, and man finds it in 
the fulfilment of his life by Jesus Christ. 



34 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

February 18. 

Shall it not be so to-day, and shall it not be 
the truth, upon which we let our minds especially 
dwell, and which we keep in our souls all the 
time, that however He may be hidden from our 
sight God is the ultimate fact and the final pur- 
pose and power of the universe, and that every- 
thing that man tries to do for his fellow-man is 
but the expression of that love of God which is 
everywhere struggling to utter itself in blessing, 
to give itself away to the soul of every one for 
whom He cares ? 



February 19. 

It is one of the signs to me of how human 
words are constantly becoming perverted that it 
surprises us when we think of freedom as a con- 
dition in which a man is called upon to do, and 
is enabled to do, the duty that God has laid upon 
him. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 35 

February 20. 

I honor the sceptic, the faithful and devout 
sceptic, with all my soul. I am no scorner of 
the man who, without scorn, finds it impossible 
to accept that which to my soul seems to be the 
absolute truth. I will scorn only that which God 
scorns. He scorns the scorner, and only the 
scorning man is worthy of the scorn of human 
kind. But while I honor the sceptic, while I 
invite him to make manifest his scepticism, not 
merely for his sake but for my own, I will not 
hold, I cannot hold that he is living a larger life 
than the man whom the Christ invites to every 
noble duty, to every faithful fulfilment of himself. 

February 21. 

God is everywhere giving himself to us, the 
opening of the windows is a signal that we want 
him and an invitation that He will be glad 
enough to answer, to come. Into every window 
that is open to Him and turned His way, Christ 
comes, God comes. 



36 SELECTIONS FROM PHIUJPS BROOKS. 

February 22. 

There is no soul so black in its sinfulness, so 
determined in its defiant obstinacy, that God 
has abandoned his throne room at the centre of 
the sinners life, and every movement is the God 
movement and every effort is the God force, with 
which man tries to break forth from his sin and 
come forth into the full sunlight of a life with 
God. Do you not think how full of hope it is ? 
Do you not see that when this great conception 
of the universe, which is Christ's conception, 
which beamed in every look that He shed upon 
the world, which was told in every word that He 
spoke and which was in every movement of His 
hand — do you not see how, when this great con- 
ception of the universe takes possession of a man, 
then all his struggle with his sin is changed, it 
becomes a strong struggle, a glorious struggle. 
He hears perpetually the voice of Christ, ' ' Be 
of good cheer. I have overcome the world. 
You shall overcome it by the same strength 
which overcame with Me. M 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 37 

February 23. 

When man is bidden to look back into his 
humanity and see what it means to be a man, 
that humanity means purity, truthfulness, earnest- 
ness, and faithfulness to that God of which hu- 
manity is a part, that God which manifested that 
humanity was a part of it, when the incarnation 
showed how close the divine and human belonged 
together — when man hears that voice, I do not 
know how he can resist, why he shall not lift 
himself up and say, " Now I can be a man, and 
I can be man only as I share in and give my 
obedience to and enter into communion with the 
life of God," and say to Christ, to Christ the 
revealer of all this, "Here I am, fulfil my 
manhood." 

February 24. 

God gives Himself to every soul that wants 
Him and declares its want by the open readiness 
of the signal which He knows. 
5 



38 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

February 25. 

What shall be our universal law of life ? Can 
we give it as we draw toward our last moment ? 
I think we can. I want to live, I want to live, 
if God will give me help, such a life that, if all 
men in the world were living it, this world 
would be regenerated and saved. I want to live 
such a life that, if that life changed into new 
personal peculiarities as it went to different 
men, but the same life still, if every man were 
living it, the millenium would be here; nay, 
heaven would be here, the universal presence of 
God. Are you living that life now? Do you 
want your life multiplied by the thousand mil- 
lion so that all men shall be like you, or don't 
you shudder at the thought, don't you give hope 
that other men are better than you are ? Keep 
that fear, but only that it may be the food of a 
diviner hope, that all the world may see in you 
the thing that man was meant to be, that is, the 
Christ. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 39 

February 26. 

It is interesting to see how all that is true in 
regard to the matter of belief, doctrine, and 
opinions which we are apt to accept. How 
strange it very often seems that men go to the 
Church, or to one another, and say: " Must I 
believe this doctrine in order that I can enter 
into the Church ? ' ' " Must I believe this doctrine 
in order that I may be saved ? ' ' men say with a 
strange sort of notion about what salvation is. 
How strange it seems, when we really have got 
our intelligence about us and know what it is to 
believe ! To believe a new truth, if it be really 
truth and we really believe it, is to have entered 
into a new region, in which our life shall find a 
new expansion and a new youth. Therefore, not 
" Must we believe? " but " May I believe? " is 
the true cry of the human creature who is seeking 
for the richest fulfilment of his life, who is work- 
ing that his whole nature may find its complete 
expansion and so its completest exercise. 



40 SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

February 27. 

To make life as successful as you can, you 
should not go away by yourself and say that you 
will live a good life, and then do nothing else. 
To cherish self is not the way to do service. 
You must lose self. Make yourself so strongly a 
part of the whole world that you influence all the 
other parts, and the more strongly cement them 
together. Take in some other life. Serve it and 
show it that there is a divine image hidden in it. 
Develop that image, and in so doing you beau- 
tify your own life. 

February 28. 
Nothing is completely good that is not infinite. 

February 29. 

Be your own best self, for the good of your 

fellow-men. 

March 1. 

It seems to me, my friends, that all this great 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 41 

picture of the liberty into which Christ sets man, 
in the first place does one thing which we are 
longing to see done in the world. It takes away 
the glamor and the splendor from sin. It breaks 
that spell by which men think that the evil thing 
is the glorious thing. If .the evil thing be that 
which Christ has told us that the evil thing is — 
which I have no time to tell you now — if every 
sin that you do is not simply a stain upon your 
soul, but is keeping you out from some great and 
splendid thing which you might do, then is there 
any sort of splendor and glory about sin ? 

March 2. 

Never dare to touch any man's life without the 
most perfect and absolute reverence, because you 
are touching the most sacred thing that is in this 
world. 

March 3. 

Oh ! how this world has perverted words and 
meanings, that the mastery of Jesus Christ should 



42 SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

seem to be the imprisonment and not the enfran- 
chisement of the soul ! When I bring a flower 
out of the darkness and set it in the sun, and let 
the sunlight come streaming down upon it, and 
the flower knows the sunlight for which it was 
made and opens its fragance and beauty ; when I 
take a dark pebble and put it into the stream and 
let the silver water go coursing down over it and 
bringing forth the hidden color that was in the 
bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, 
the flower and stone rejoice. I can almost hear 
hear them sing in the field and in the stream. 
What then ? "Shall not man bring his nature out 
into the fullest illumination, and surprise himself 
by the things that he might do ? Oh ! the little- 
ness of the lives that we are living ! Oh ! the way 
in which we fail to comprehend, or when we do 
comprehend, deny to ourselves the bigness of that 
thing which it is to be a man, to be a child of God ! 

March 4. 

What is the Christian ? Everywhere the man 



SKI.KCTIONS FROM PHIIXIPS BROOKS. 43 

who, so far as he comprehends Jesus Christ, so far 

as he can get any knowledge of Him, is His 

servant, the man who makes Christ the teacher of 

his intelligence and the guide of his soul, the 

man who obeys Christ as far as he has been able 

to understand Him. What, you say, the man 

who imperfectly understands Christ, who don't 

know anything about His divinity, who denies the 

great doctrines of the Church in regard to Him, 

is he a Christian ? Certainly he is, my friends. 

There is no other test than this, the following of 

Jesus Christ. 

March 5. 

Let yourselves never think that you grow liberal 
in faith by believing less ; always be sure that the 
true liberality of faith can only come by believ- 
ing more. 

March 6. 

There is no single act of your life, my friend, 
there is no single dilemma in which you find 
yourself placed, in which the answer is not in 
Jesus Christ. 



44 SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

March 7. 

Ask yourself of any habit that belongs to your 
own personal life, and bring it face to face with 
Jesus Christ and see if it is not judged. A judg- 
ment day that is far away, that is off in the dim 
distance when this world is done — it shall come, 
no doubt. I know none of us can know much 
with regard to it, except that it is sure. But the 
judgment day that is here now is Christ; the 
judgment day that is right close to your life and 
rebukes you, if you will let Him rebuke you every 
time you sin, the judgment day that is here and 
praises you and bids you be of good courage, 
when you do a thing that men disown and despise, 
is Christ. 

March 8. 

Have you ever thought of how the world has 
stood in glory and honor before the sinless human- 
ity of Jesus Christ ? If any life could prove, if 
any argument could show on investigation to-day 
that Jesus did one sin in all his life, that the per- 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 45 

feet liberty which was His perfect purity was not 
absolutely perfect, do you realize what a horror 
would seem to fall down from the heavens, what 
a constraint and burden would be laid upon the 
lives of men, how the gates of men's possibilities 
would seem to close in upon them ? It is because 
there has been that one life which, because abso- 
lutely pure from sin, was absolutely free; it is 
because man may look up and see in that life the 
revelation and possibility of his own ; it is because 
that life echoing the great cry throughout the 
world that man everywhere is the son of God, 
offers the same purity — and so the same freedom 
— to all mankind ; it is for that reason that a man 
rejoices to cling to, to believe in, however impure 
his life is, the perfect purity, the sinlessness of 
the life of Jesus. 

March 9. 

The Christian faith is not a dogma, it is not 
primarily a law, but is a personal presence and 
an immediate life that is right here and now. 



46 SELECTIONS EROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

March 10. 

Jesus Christ, the comforter of sorrow. He 
is the comforter of sorrow, for he knew and 
he knows what sorrow is. In his own cruci- 
fixion, in that which came before His cruci- 
fixion, He knew the suffering of this earthly 
life. There is no human being w r ho ever 
has known the misery of man as Jesus knows it, 
and so He comes to all sorrows with tender con- 
solation. God grant, God grant He may come 
to any of you who have come into these doors 
to-day with a sorrow, with a fear, with a dread 
upon your hearts, with souls that are wrung, with 
bodies that are suffering! God grant that the 
Christ may comfort you, may comfort you. 

March n. 

The old legend was that the clothes of the 
Israelites, which the Bible said waxed not old 
upon them in the desert during those forty years, 
not merely waxed not old those forty years, but 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 47 

grew with their growth, so that the little Hebrew 
who crossed the Red Sea in his boy's clothes wore 
the same clothes when he entered into the 
Promised Land. It is the parable of that which 
comes to the man who has a true Christian faith, 
a faith which comes in the personal friendship of 
Christ, a faith which comes not in the belief of 
certain things about Him, not in the doing 
slavishly of certain things which it seemed as if it 
had been said by Him that we must do, but in 
the personal entrance into His nature in a life 
for Him, in which he is able to send His life 
down into us. 

March 12. 

How that idea has haunted men in every period 
of their existence, how it is haunting you, that 
there is some higher life which it is possible to 
live ! There has never been a religion that has 
not started there, lifted up its eyes and seen, afar 
off, what it was possible for man to do from day 
to day, in contrast with the things which men 



48 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

immediately and presently are. There is not any 
moment of the human soul which has not rested 
upon some great conception that man has a 
nobler being than he was ordinarily conceiving 
himself to be ; that he was not destined to the 
things which were ordinarily occupying his life ; 
that he might be living a greater and nobler life. 
It is because the Christian Scriptures have laid 
most earnestly hold of this idea, it is because it 
was represented not simply in the words which 
Christ said, but in the very being which Christ 
was, that we go to them to get the inspiration 
and the indication, the revelation and the enlight- 
enment which we need. 

March 13. 

As the man walks up the mountain, he seems 
to pass out of the cloud which hangs about the 
lower slopes of the mountain, until at last he 
stands upon the pinnacle at the top, and there is 
in the perfect light. Is it not exactly like the 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 49 

mountain at whose foot there seems to be the 
open sunshine where men see everything, and on 
whose summit there is the sunshine, but on whose 
sides, and half way up, there seems to linger a 
long cloud, in which man has to struggle until he 
comes to the full result of his life ? So it is with 
self-consecration, with service. You easily do it 
in some small ways in the lower life. Life be- 
comes intensified and earnest with a serious pur- 
pose, and it seems as if it gathered itself together 
into selfishness. Only then it opens by and by 
into the largest and noblest works of men, in 
which they most manifest the richness of their 
human nature and appropriate the strength of 
God. 

March 14. 

Pray. Yes go to the God whom you but dimly 
see and pray to Him in the darkness, where He 
seems to sit. Ask Him, as if He were, that He 
will give you that which, if He is, must come 
from Him, can come from him alone. Pray 



50 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

anxiously. Pray passionately, in the simplest of 
all words, with the simplest of all thoughts. Pray, 
the manliest thing that a man can do, the fasten- 
ing of his life to the eternal, the drinking of his 
thirsty soul out of the great fountain of life. And 
pray distinctly. Pray upon your knees. One 
grows tired sometimes of the free thought, which 
is yet perfectly true, that a man can pray any- 
where and anyhow. But men have found it good 
to make the whole system pray. Kneel down, 
and the very bending of these obstinate and un- 
used knees of yours will make the soul kneel down 
in the humility in which it can be exalted in the 
sight of God. 

March 15. 

Christ is the very embodiment of human liberty. 
In His own personal life and in everything that 
He did and said, He was forever uttering the 
great gospel that man, in order to become his 
completest, must become his freest, that what a 
man did when he entered into a new life was to 



SEXKCTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 51 

open a new region in which new powers were to 
find their exercise, in which he was to be able to 
be and do things which he could not be and do 
in more restricted life. It is the acceptance ot 
that idea, it seems to me, that makes us true dis- 
ciples of Christ and of that great gospel, and that 
transfigures everything. 

March 16. 

u As many as received Him, to them gave He 
power to become the sons of God. M 

Just think of it ! — the sons of God ! The power 
to become that to as many as will receive the 
present Christ. 

March 17. 

Do not let yourselves say, that the man who 
gives himself to Jesus Christ and earnestly tries to 
enter in deeper and deeper into his life and tries 
to do his will, that he may know the Christ and 
know himself in the Christ more and more— dare 
not call that brother a fool, as you have some- 



52 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

times called your Christian man who watched 
scrupulously over his life and prayed. When a 
man for the first time bows down upon his knees 
and prays, " Oh ! Christ, come unto me, reveal 
Thyself to me, make me to know Thee, that I 
may receive Thee, make me to be obedient that I 
may take Thee into my life," then that man has 
claimed his manhood. I beg you, I implore you, 
I adjure you that, if you be not ready to be 
Christian, you at least will know that the Chris- 
tian life is the only true human life, and that the 
man who becomes thoroughly a Christian sets his 
face toward the fulfilment of his humanity, and 
so for the first time truly is a man. 

March 18. 

When a man turns away from his sins and en- 
ters into energetic holiness, when a man sacrifices 
his own self-indulgence and goes forth a pure 
servant of his God and his fellow-men, there is 
only one cry in the whole gospel of that man, 
and that is the cry of freedom. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 53 

March 19. 

The whole sum of this title of life is service. 
Service to others and not to self. Self is a narrow 
space. I wish to speak to the young men who 
have just opened the door of life and to the old 
men who are just before the door that opens to a 
life beyond. Life is not an existence for self. It 
is this service that is the grand exponent of a suc- 
cessful life. To determine what success a life 
may attain is to see how much a life may accom- 
plish for the bettering of humanity. 

March 20. 

He who understands life deeply and fully, un- 
derstands life truly ; he has forever renewed his 
life ; and if there comes into our hearts, in the 
life which we are living, a perpetual sense that 
life needs renewal, a richening and refreshing, 
then it is in order that we may go down into the 
depths and see what lies at the root of things — 
things that we are perpetually doing and think- 



54 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

ing. It is that we may open to ourselves some 
newer, higher life. It is that we may understand 
the life that we may live, alongside of and as a 
richer devlopment of that life which we are living 
from day to day, which we have been living during 
the years of our life. 

March 21. 

Liberty is the fullest opportunity for man to be 
and do the very best that is possible for him. 

March 22. 

What is a liberal faith, my friends ? It seems 
to me that by every true meaning of the word, 
by every true thought of the idea, a liberal faith 
is a faith that believes much, and not a faith that 
believes little. The more a man believes, the more 
liberally he exercises his capacity of faith, the 
more he sends forth his intelligence into the 
mysteries of God, the more he understands those 
things which God chooses to reveal to his crea- 
tures, the more liberally he believes. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 55 

March 23. 

Let us know ourselves children of God, and 
claim the liberty which God has given to every 
one of his children who will take it. God bless 
you and give some of you, help some of us to 
claim, as we have never claimed before, that free- 
dom with which the Son makes free ! 

March 24. 

I believe in God with all my soul, because this 
world is inexplicable without Him and explicable 
with Him, and because Jesus Christ believed in 
Him; and it was Jesus Christ that showed me 
that this world demanded God and was inexpli- 
cable without Him ; that made certain every 
suspicion and dream that I had had before, and 
Jesus Christ believed in Him. Shall I go to the 
expert about chemistry or geology and ask him 
the truth with regard to the structure of the world 
and the meaning of its atoms and forces ? And 
shall not I go to the spiritual expert, to Him in 



56 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

whom the spiritual life of man has been clearest, 
and say, "O Christ, tell me what is the centre 
and source and end of all?" When he says, 
" God," shall T not believe Him? 

March 25. 

The man who lives in God knows no life ex- 
cept the life of God. 

March 26. 

Can I, can you, have Christ in human history, 
Christ in the world, and live as if He were not 
here ? Will you not give yourself to that of Him 
which you know to day? Will you not at least 
lay hold of the very skirts of His garment and 
say, "I see that Thou art good, I see that Thou 
art true. Lead me into the goodness and truth 
which by communion and sympathy shall know 
Thee more. I would enter into Thee, to see 
whether it has indeed come in Thee, and Thou 
shalt lead me, Thou shalt teach me. Lord, I be- 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIUJPS BROOKS. 57 

lieve. I have not grasped Thee. No man has 
grasped Thee. The man who says that he has 
grasped Thee proves thereby that he does not 
know Thee. I know that I have not grasped 
Thee, but I will follow Thee, by doing right- 
eousness, by serving truth, by knowing and ac- 
knowledging Thee until all of that shall become 
clear to me. I will follow Thee, and Thou shalt 
lead me into the glory which Thou Thyself 
abidest in. 

March 27. 

It is true, indeed, that as soon as a man be- 
comes eager for belief, for the truth of God and 
for the mysteries with which God's universe is 
filled, he becomes all the more critical and care- 
ful. He will not any longer, if he were before, 
be simply greedy of things to believe, so that if 
any superstition comes offering itself to him he 
will not gather it in indiscriminately and believe it 
without evidence, without examination. He be- 
comes all the more critical and careful, the more 



58 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

he becomes assured that belief, and not unbelief, 
is the true condition of his life. 

March 28. 

It belongs to Christ in men first to prove that 
man may be a Christian and yet do business ; and, 
in the second place, to show how a man, as he 
becomes a greater Christian, shall purify and lift 
the business that he does and make it the worthy 
occupation of the Son of God. 

March 29. 

You have got to know that religion, the service 
of Christ, is not something to be taken in in ad- 
dition to your life ; it is your life. It is not a 
ribbon that you shall tie in your hat, and go down 
the street declaring yourself that you have ac- 
cepted something in addition to the life which 
your fellow-men are living. It is something 
which, taken in your heart, shall glow in every 
action, so that your fellow-men shall say, " Lo, 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 59 

how he lives ! What new life has come into 
him ? It is that insistance upon the great essen- 
tialness of the religious life — it is the insistence 
that religion is not a lot of things that a man 
does, but is a new life that a man lives, uttering 
itself in new actions because it is the new life. 

March 30. 

Jesus the soul must have, the one yesterday, 
to-day and forever ; He that is and was and is 
to be. 

March 31. 

Men dwell upon what He was, and upon what 
He is ; I rather think to-day of what He is to be. 
And when I see men looking to the future and 
not to the past — nay, looking to the future and 
not to the present, valuing the present only as it 
is the seed-ground of the future, the foundation 
upon which the structure is to rise whose pinnacle 
shall some day pierce the sky — I want to tell them 
of the Jesus that shall be. In fuller comprehen- 



60 SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

sion of Him, with deeper understanding of His 
life, with a more entire impression of what He is 
and of what He may be to the soul, so men shall 
understand Him in the days to be, and yet He 
shall be the same Christ still. The future belongs 
to Jesus Christ — yes, the same Christ that I be- 
lieve in, and that I call upon you to believe in 
to-day, but a larger, fuller, more completely com- 
prehended Christ— the Christ that is to be, the 
same Christ that was and suffered. 

April i. 

There is one great figure, and it has taken in 
all Christian consciousness, that again and again 
this work with Christ has been asserted to be the 
true service in the army of a great master, of a 
great captain, who goes before us to his victory, 
that it is asserted that in that captain, in the en- 
trance into His army, every power is set free. 

April 2. 

Claim your freedom in service. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 6 1 

April 3. 

Come into the Church of Jesus Christ. There 
is no other body on the face of the earth that 
represents what she represents — the noble destiny 
of the human soul, the great capacity of human 
faith, the inexhaustible and unutterable love of 
God, the Christ, who stands to manifest them all. 

April 4. 

Are you and I going to be such creatures of our 
senses that we shall not believe that there are 
powers that touch us that we cannot see ? Am I 
going to be so bound down to these poor fingers 
and to these poor eyes that I shall know myself 
in no larger connection with the great, unseen 
world? I will not. No great man, no manly 
man, has ever allowed such a limitation of him- 
self. There is the unseen presence in the midst 
of our life, and he who will feel it may feel it, 
and that unseen presence speaks to him continu- 
ally. 



62 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

April 5. 

When you sin, my friends, it is a man that sins, 
and a man is a child of God ; and for a child of 
God to sin is an awful thing, not simply for the 
stain that he brings into the divine nature that 
is in him, but for the life from which it shuts him 
out, for the liberty which he abandons, for the * 
enthrallment which it lays upon the soul. 

April 6. 

If there were any stirring in our souls after the 
deeper and diviner desires, could we, would we, 
have been satisfied until we had found Jesus, and 
entered into some sympathy with His life, that 
He might give to us what revelation of life and 
what guidance of will it might be possible should 
come from Him to men who trusted Him, until 
we had entered into sympathy with Him and the 
fascinations of His character ? That is the Chris- 
tian life, my friends, the thing we make so vague 
and mysterious and difficult. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 63 

April 7. 

The most awful thought that comes to a man 
sometimes, is the thought of a soul that he injured 
years and years ago, and that he cannot find and 
cannot reach and cannot touch and cannot help. 
His own life is under better influence ; his own 
life is uplifted ; but where is the man, where is 
the woman, to whom he did the harm years and 
years ago ? God save us from that. It would be 
hopeless if it had not the infinite hope in the end- 
less love of God to fall back upon. 

April 8. 

Be happy in your faith. Be calm in your faith. 
Be strong with the great assurance which is in the 
heart of God, who knows the sorrow of our human 
life as none of us have ever begun to know it, and 
yet keeps, in the depths of His divinity, His per- 
fect joy. Dare to be happy, even in this stricken, 
burdened world, because it is God's world. It is 
only a little while, it is only a few years, and then 



64 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

comes the increased work that lies beyond. Shall 
it be our work ? 

April 9. 
Every man may go about his daily task with 
his hand clasped in the very hand of Jesus. 
Every man may lift up his eyes every morning 
and give the day that he is beginning to live to 
Jesus Christ, who shall fill it all with Himself. 
Every man may fulfill his own life into a fullness 
which goes beyond any possible conception that 
he can form of it in his own heart — different from 
the life of every other man that ever lived, be- 
cause it is singular, individual, original and new. 
Every man may know the Father with the child's 
true heart. 

April 10. 

The tendency that reaches through all the 
regions of thought and of action ; that is filling 
all our schools and colleges, and making them 
burst their bounds ; that is distracting statesmen 
and making them wonder how their poor plans 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 65 

can keep pace with the great designs which are 
moving in the world, — is it not this : that the 
things which have been called the portion of the 
few shall more and more, and at last wholly, be 
the possession of every man who in his own true 
way will seek for their possession ? The great 
democracy, the belief that man as man has a 
right to the privileges of his manhood ; that they 
are not confined to some little select few, of 
peculiar nature, of peculiar education, nor by 
them to be distributed with niggardly hand to 
those who will not be content at all without 
them; but that they are the possession of all man- 
kind by right ; that what man can be, what it is 
the nature of man in this world to be, man may 
be ; and that it is in the nature of man in this 
world to be higher than he is and to come to 
loftier conditions than those which he has dared 
to know, — is not that the great principle that 
is to-day pervading and changing all human 
life? 



66 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

April ii. 

The poet pictures to us in his imagination those 
things which do not appeal to our life, because 
they find nothing to correspond to their high 
portraits, to show those transformations of nature 
into something that is entirely different and 
foreign to itself. If religion be simply the dream 
that some men hold it to be, if it simply be the 
cheating of man's soul with that which has no 
reality to correspond to it, then it will be no 
more than this. Is there any assurance that is 
given to us, that is before the soul of man, of 
some great new life which it is given for man to 
seek, without which it is given for no man to be 
satisfied ? I do not know where any man could 
find that assurance absolutely and entirely, unless 
there had stood forth before us the person of Him 
who spoke these words and who manifested them 
in His life. And therefore it is that, having pic- 
tured to you the richness of the life which is open 
to every man, his own true life, the large freedom 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 67 

into which he may go if, giving up his sins he 
enters into the fulness of the life of God. 

April 12 

How is it in religion ? Have you not come to 
believe, are you not working continually upon 
the belief, that those great experiences, those lofty 
communions with God, those enterings into the 
secret places of His presence, that sense of one- 
ness with His Spirit, which men used to ascribe 
to special natures, consecrated to a peculiar saint- 
hood, belong to every man, everywhere, simply 
in virtue of his humanity ; and that in some way 
those things may yet become the possession of 
every human soul ; that, not only to saints who 
sit upon the mountain tops, in rapt psalm-sing- 
ing, not merely to the souls who plunge into the 
deepest of overwhelming thoughts and hide them- 
selves in the darkness which lies below the hard 
tread of man, but to every man may come, — and 
marvelous it seems when we say it, — to every man 



68 SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

may come the daily recognized communion with 
God. 

April 13. 

That great thing you and I are called upon to 
do — the total acceptance by our nature of the 
will of God, the total acceptance by our nature of 
the mastery of Jesus Christ. 

April 14. 

What is the great cry, what is. the great aspira- 
tion ? As the Apostle has lifted up his voice and 
sung out for us in the wondrous music of his great 
epistle: " Till we all come, in the unity of the 
faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God,' ' 
— not to some strange, unnatural thing, not to 
humanity improved and changed into something 
else, but till we come " to the perfect man," It 
is good for us, it is right for us, it is true for us, 
it makes us strong, to know that. I am struggling 
toward myself, and just so far as the Christ comes 
and fills me I am the thing I am, the thing I was 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 69 

first of all in the thought of God, before He sent 
me on the earth — the thing which by His grace I 
shall be as eternity perfects my life in Him. 

April 15. 

Dear friends, dear brethren, it is not simply 
that you shall warm one another by the contact 
of your lives ; it is not merely that you shall do 
the things which some conception of duty on 
your part obliges you to do ; but it is that you 
shall have the mind of Jesus Christ, shall have in 
yourselves the life, and then the power of the life 
will show itself. 

April 16. 

It is the Christian life that must lie behind all 
enthusiasm, behind all energy ; and he who would 
make himself or his brethern more enthusiastic, 
more energetic, must go behind the outward 
manifestations and find the source of inspiration 
in the controlling mind of Jesus Christ. 



70 SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

April 17. 

u I am my best for the sake of all mankind/ ' 
Make that your rule in life, dear friend, and do 
you not see what a calm, strong, even and com- 
pleted life it brings ? The world claims for you, 
and your own soul claims for you, your best. It 
is an obligation to yourself and an obligation to 
the world. You know how little you are think- 
ing, how little you are doing, to fulfil the best 
meaning of this human life that lies before you. 
Go forth and serve the world, and you will know 
that you must be a nobler man in order that you 
may serve it fully. 

April 18. 

We all know how it is, all along, with the life 
in which we are living. Sometimes the sky which 
is above us, which is always radiant with light, 
opens its supremest depths and lets us see, as it 
were, into the very city of the throne of God. 
Sometimes, as we sail on the ocean, some peculiar 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 7 1 

radiance upon its surface seems to open all its 
depths and let us see how deeply it mirrows all 
the world. So it is in the life of men, and so it 
is especially in the life of the great Man who 
stands as our Example, our Saviour, our Guide. 

We never see so deeply into the depths of any 
human nature as when we see that nature lifting 
itself up by prayer. Prayer is the consummation 
of the human life, and it is also its spontaneous 
action. And so, when one prays in the presence 
of his fellow-men, it seems as if those fellow men, 
looking into his life most deeply, would be able, 
at any time, to enter into the richness of his con- 
sciousness, his communion with God, which must 
be the fulness of his life. And so we can see that 
when Christ stood before His disciples and offered 
up His heart to God, then most deeply did men 
look into His soul and understand Him. 

April 19. 

The great thing is you must live near to God. 
You must let no problem interest you that does 



72 SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

not bring you into the life of God. And remem- 
ber what we talk about when we talk about com- 
ing near to God, and God coming near to us. I 
do not know what it is for God to come near to 
us. He is infinitely near at every moment of our 
life. I do not know how He can come any nearer 
to me, or how I can come any nearer to Him, 
except in the discovery of His nearness to me. 
There is no coming nearer of God to man, except 
the showing to man how near He is to man already. 
And there is no coming near of man to God, ex- 
cept in the man's coming to know how near he 
always has been to the heavenly Father. And so 
the coming near to God is just the opening of the 
eyes, just the knowing of the fact that God is in- 
finitely near to you. You cannot picture greater 
nearness. You cannot crowd yourself to His 
bosom more closely than He is holding you to 
His bosom now. 

April 20. 

I am to serve my fellow-men because they are 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 73 

God's children ; because, in the great, deep mys- 
tery of the words that Jesus spoke, when I am 
serving them I am serving Him. The life that I 
am to cultivate lies in Him. 



April 21. 

Self-culture and self-sacrifice, both present them- 
selves as true and pressing duties of a human ex- 
istence. No man has any right to contemplate 
the life before him, no man has any right to be 
living at any moment of his life, unless he knows 
himself to be doing all that he can to develop his 
soul and make it shine with its peculiar lustre in the 
firmament of existence. And no man has a right 
to be living at any moment unless he is also cast- 
ing himself away and entering into the complete 
and devoted service of his fellow-men. Self-cul- 
ture and self-sacrifice, — these two have been the 
great inspiring forces of existence in all ages, in 
every land. 



74 SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

April 22. 

Revelation is salvation. Open your eyes and 
see how close He is to your human nature, and 
then you find illuminated before you the purpose 
of your own self-culture, the purpose of your self- 
sacrifice, and make them one. 

And never think, oh, brethren, never think that 
coming near to God is a terrible thing. Never 
think that it is a thing to overwhelm a man with 
fear and distress. 

April 23. 

Every duty, every will of God, every command- 
ment of Christ, every self-surrender that a man is 
called upon to obey or to make — do not think of 
it as if it were simply a restraint to liberty, but 
think of it as the very means of freedom, by which 
we realize the very purpose of God and the fulfil- 
ment of our life. 

April 24. 

Oh, my friends, what does it mean to know that, 
from the day the first man, in his pure rudimen- 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 75 

tary innocence, trod upon this earth until to-day, 
when the sons of men go staggering under the 
burden of these thousands of years of experience, 
when men grow dark with the problems and bright 
with the joys of life, — to know that, save for Him 
who stands upon the hill-top of our humanity, 
glorifying and perfecting our humanity with His 
divine life, there never yet has been, in perfectness, 
the thing that we call man upon the earth ? 

April 25. 

As soon as I can feel about my friend, who has 
become a better man, that he has become a larger 
and not a smaller, a freer and not a more im- 
prisoned man, as soon as I lift up my voice and 
say that the man is free, then I understand him 
more fully, and he becomes a revelation to me in 
the higher and richer life which is possible for me 
to live. 

April 26. 

I am anxious to have you know that to be a 



76 SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

Christian does not mean primarily to believe this 
or that. It does not mean primarily, although it 
means necessarily afterward, to do this or that. 
But it means to know the presence of a true per- 
sonal Christ among us and to follow Him. Here 
is the only true power by which a religion can 
become perpetual. 

April 27. 

I know not what our Christian faith means un- 
less these things are true, unless it be true that 
behind all enthusiasm and energy must be the 
deep life of the soul opening itself to God, and 
that the soul, opening itself to God and filled with 
Him, becomes by the possession of God its own 
true self, recognizes this as its own natural condi- 
tion, and sees how unmanly and unnatural is any 
other way of living. 

April 28. 

And so it must certainly be true, somehow or 
other, that self-culture and self-sacrifice are not 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 77 

merely capable of being reconciled to one another 
by compromises which they shall make between 
them, but that they are mutual ministers to one an- 
other, and that the more truly a man sacrifices him- 
self to others, the more truly shall he live in his own 
life ; the more truly he lives in his own life, the 
more truly shall he be a sacrifice to his fellow men. 

April 29. 

It does not take a great man to do great things. 
It only takes a consecrated, a devoted man ; be- 
cause God does everything, and man does nothing 
except what God does through him. 

April 30. 

And don't dare to hurt any soul ; for to hurt a 
soul is to touch the very substance of the life of 
God. 

May 1. 

* In all the simplest characters that line between 
the mental and moral natures is always vague and 



7§ SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

indistinct. They run together, and in their best 
combinations you are unable to discriminate, in the 
wisdom which is their result, how much is moral 
and how much is intellectual. You are unable 
to tell whether in the wise acts and words which 
issue from such a life there is more of the right- 
eousness that comes of a clear conscience, or of 
the sagacity that comes of a clear brain. 

May 2. 

The essence of the Christian life — what is it 
but the perfecting of the human life by the in- 
dwelling of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ ? 

May 3. 

I wish I had the power to convince every one 
of my hearers of the importance of service. In 
service you throw yourself into another life. The 
other life becomes part of yourself, you part of 
that other life ; you are one. You work together 
for the bettering of the world. Just so you enter 
into God and the divine life enters into you. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS- 79 

You do not surrender to pope, priest, or church, 
but still have your own independence. You 
simply surrender to God. 

May 4. 

May Christ be with you, may you be with 
Him, every day, every hour ! 

May 5. 

Let the heart be right, and the voice will shout 
and the hands must work. 

May 6. 

Do whatever you can to help every struggling 
soul, to add new strength to any staggering cause, 
the poor sick man that is by you, the poor 
wronged man whom you with your influence 
might vindicate, the poor boy in your shop that 
you may set with new hope upon the road of life 
that is beginning already to look dark to him. I 
cannot tell you what it is. You know your duty. 
No man ever looked for it and did not find it. 



80 SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

May 7. 

There is only One to whose words we can turn 
to seek our guidance and direction, our inspira- 
tion and our joy. 

May 8. 

As man has been, so has the world responded 
to his touch and call. 

May 9. 

Into every soul, just so far and just so fast as it 
is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats 
His life and gives His help. 

May 10. 

The man of the nineteenth century thinks very 
differently from the man of the eighteenth, but 
the love with which he worships God is the same 
love. The evangelical has different dogmas from 
the old Georgian Churchman, but they bow be- 
fore the same mercy seat, and resist the same 
temptations by the same grace. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 8l 

May ii. 

I will put my life into the Church ; all the 

more I will drink the strength that she can give 

to me. 

May 12. 

Every man who is a Christian must live a 
Christian life that is peculiarly his own. 

May 13. 

God will make you good by sending His light 
and love into that past of yours and giving all 
that there is good in its true development and 
consecration. 

May 14. 

When shall we learn that with all true men it 
is not what they intend to do, but it is what 
the qualities of their natures bind them to do, 
that determines their career ? 

May 15. 

The life which is lived under the inspiration of 



82 SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

Jesus Christ, and which we call the Christian life, 
is the freest of all lives, because it is the highest. 

May 16. 

The study of human progress is one of the 
strangest studies in which we can engage. When 
we look about us, we see the one-sided fashion in 
which the world advances, now throwing for- 
ward one side, and then advancing the other side 
until it shall come up to it. It is not thus that 
the highest progress of the soul is pictured. It is 
not by putting forth first one part of our nature, 
to the exclusion of the other parts, and then let- 
ting the other parts overtake it, that man is really 
to advance. There must be a great power of ad- 
vance that shall go on along the whole line. It 
must be that the total man, with all the powers of 
his existence, with all the life that has been given 
to him to live, shall move on together. That is 
the progress that we expect in the clear atmos- 
phere, in the pure life, of the eternal world. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 83 

May 17. 

Never fear to bring the sublimest comfort to 
the smallest trouble. 

May 18. 

Do not dare to think ever that you, you who 
go with the consecrated soul to seek your brother, 
are the power by which that soul is being sought 
in the universe of God. God loves every soul to 
which you go, with a love that your love toward 
Him cannot begin to understand. God is seek- 
ing every soul that you are seeking, with the im- 
mediate impulses of His grace and love, in ways 
too deep and mysterious for you and me to begin 
to comprehend. That will not make us think, 
in one slightest degree, that our seeking of that 
soul is useless ; but it will make us go with great 
eagerness and with faith and with hope, doing 
what we can for every brother, but thankful to 
know that that brother is God's child, and that 
He is seeking that soul and ministering His love 



84 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

to it directly, as well as though the feeble minis- 
try that we can bring. 

May 19. 

Come near to God with the deep sense of how 
near God wants you to come to Him. Open 
your eyes and see God, with the certainty that 
when they open, they shall see upon His face the 
infinite love and the divine patience with which 
He is waiting for your soul. 

May 20. 

What will heaven be ? What will be the sub- 
stance on which they shall stand who worship 
God and praise Him in the ages of eternity ? I 
find manifold fitness in the answer that tells us 
that it shall be a " sea of glass mingled with fire." 
Heaven will not be pure stagnation, not idleness, 
not any more luxurious dreaming over the 
spiritual repose that has been safely and forever 
won ; but active, tireless, earnest work ; fresh, 



SELECTIONS EROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 85 

live enthusiasm for the high labors which eternity 

will offer. These vivid inspirations will play 

through our deep repose, and make it more 

mighty in the service of God than any feverish 

and unsatisfied toil of earth has ever been. The 

sea of glass will be mingled with fire. Here too 

we have the type and standard of that heavenli- 

ness of character which ought to be ripening in 

all of us now, as we are getting ready for that 

spiritual life. 

May 21. 

Dreadful will be the day when the world be- 
comes contented, when one great universal satis- 
faction spreads itself over the world. Sad will 
be the day for every man when he becomes abso- 
lutely contented with the life that he is living, 
with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the 
deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever 
beating at the doors of his soul some great desire 
to do something larger which he knows that he 
was meant and made to do because he is a child 

of God. 

8 „ 



86 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

May 22. 

Do not think that greatness and vigor of in- 
terest involve fury and heat. Be calm. Go to 
your fellow-man and invite him to come and live 
the life in Jesus Christ, as if you were inviting 
him to do the most natural thing that it is possi- 
ble for him to do ; as if you were bidding him to 
come and be himself. Be calm ; for calmness 
harmonizes the tumultuous elements of existence 
in the consciousness of God. Be your best, for 
the good of God's children. 

May 23. 

What a man comes to be when he becomes a 
Christian is a deeper, truer, more entire, more 
essential man. When the great ocean beats and 
gurgles over the reef that stands across the bay, 
and pours itself in upon the inlet which is a real 
part of its own life, the inlet shakes and trembles 
with the incoming of the sea; but by and by it 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 87 

knows that thus, and thus only, has it come to be 
what it was made to be. 

May 24. 

Let no man preach to you any doctrine which 
would come in conflict with the fullest develop- 
ment of the power of your life. Every power is 
to be brought into its fullest development. You 
are to make body, soul and spirit just as full and 
united, as they are bound together in your per- 
sonal existence, as you can. And you are to 
serve your fellow-men with the fullest consecra- 
tion of your life ; but you can do this only as you 
serve, through yourself and through your brethren, 
the God whose children you and those brethren are. 

May 25. 

There are certain experiences in every life 
which have their power just in this, that they 
break through the elaborate surface, and get down 
to the simplest thoughts and emotions of the 



88 SELECTIONS FROM PHIUJPS BROOKS. 

human heart. Great sickness, sudden bereave- 
ment, great joy, intense love or enthusiasm, 
fatherhood, the near sight of death, — all of these 
supreme experiences of life are characterized by 
the breadth, the largeness of the simple thoughts 
and feelings they awaken. In them you have 
the crust broken to fragments, and the great 
heart of life laid open. And if that heart, laid 
open, is inevitably, universally spiritual ; if, as we 
always see in these supreme moments of the life, 
a soul most vividly asserts itself, the man in- 
sists upon another world and on a God. 

May 26. 

The man never lived, save He who perfected 
our humanity, who ever did the very best he 
could. You dishonor your life, you not simply 
shut your eyes to certain facts, you not simply say 
an infinitely absurd and foolish thing, but you 
dishonor your human life if you say that you have 
done in any day of your life, or in all the days of 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 89 

your life put together, the very best that you 
could, or been the very best man that you could 
be. You ! what are you ? Again I say, The 
child of God ; and this which you have been, 
what is it ? Look over it, see how selfish it has 
been, see how material it has been, how it has 
lived in the depths when it might have lived on 
the heights; see how it has lived in the little, 
narrow range of selfishness, when it might have 
been as broad as all humanity — nay, when it 
might have been as the God of humanity. 

May 27. 

The very moment I become conscious of my 
own individual existence, I also become conscious 
of this vast ocean of existence beating in upon 
me from every side, through every avenue of ap- 
proach, meeting my gaze in every direction in 
which I look toward the horizon that sweeps 
around me, and pressing upon me through the 
lives with which I am surrounded. 



90 SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

May 28. 

It would be intolerable to us if we could not 
trace tendencies in our life. If everything stood 
still, or if things only moved around in a circle, 
it would be a dreary and a dreadful thing to live. 
But we rejoice in life because it seems to be carry- 
ing us somewhere, because its darkness seems to 
be rolling on towards light, and even its pain to 
be moving onward to a hidden joy. We bear 
with incompleteness because of the completion 
which is prophesied and hoped for. 

May 29. 

The forgiveness of our sins, the separation from 
the circumstances of our sins, the removal from 
our temptations, everything that the Lord can do 
for us, are but leading on to this, that He shall 
fill us with Himself, that we shall make our lives 
the very utterance of His life and of the life of 
the Father, that comes to us from Him. 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 91 

May 30. 

We moralize, we philosophize, about the dis- 
content of man. We give little reasons for it ; 
but the real reason of it all is this, that which 
everything lying behind it really signifies, that 
man is greater than his circumstances, and that 
God is always calling to him to come up to the 
fulness of his life. 

May 31. 

The world, as it goes on, is to become vastly 
more individualistic than it has ever been yet. 
Every soul is to feel the awful sweetness of being 
commissioned by God to live, and of being differ- 
ent from every other life. 

June 1. 

The noble souls have always known the neces- 
sity that nature has laid upon them, in all ages, tp 
develop their souls by self- culture and self sacri^ 
flee. If study, in which men have meditated 



92 SELECTIONS EROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

upon the problems of their own life, has set men 
fighting their own personal battles, wrestling with 
their own personal sins, self-sacrifice also has set 
up its altars in the world. It has taught men, in 
the darkest ages, to live not only for themselves, 
but for others. It has taught men to know that 
the noblest thing men could do with human life 
was to give that human life away. If self-culture 
has built the schools, self-sacrifice has built the 
altars, has sent men to their martyrdom, has made 
men ingenious^and gracious, as they have struggled 
with the problems of their own existence. It is 
impossible for us not to recognize both of these 
as the two great missions, the two great intuitions, 
the two great fields of duty, which God has offered 
to every man. 

June 2. 

I cannot help calling you now to think about 
Him who gives, not merely by His words, but 
by the whole of His own person and life, that 
manifestation of the reality of the divine ex- 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 93 

istence and tempts us to follow after Him. In 
other words, we come to-day to think of Christ, 
Christ who claims to be the master of the world. 
Christ from whom the revelation of that higher 
life has come. * * * * It is our Christ in 
whom we Christians believe. It is the Christ in 
whom a great many of you listening to me now 
claim to believe — I do myself — in whom many of 
you do believe, whom many of you have followed 
into that newer life. I would to God that I 
could so set Him before you to-day, could so 
make you feel his actual presence in the life 
which we are living, which we may be living, 
that there should be no question in any man of 
the power that is open before him to enter into 
the higher life and to fulfil his soul to God. 

June 3, 

It is the very abundance of the strange specu- 
lations with regard to Christ, it is the very 
strangeness of the theories that have been formed 



94 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

with regard to Him, that has shown me how He 
has drawn the hearts of men, how He has not let 
them go, but compelled them to fasten themselves 
to Him, to think about Him and try to follow 
Him in such poor, blind ways as they were able 
to give themselves to Him in. This, then, is the 
Christian faith. This is the way in which the 
larger life opens before mankind, by the follow- 
ing of a person, by the giving of the life into the 
dominion and the guidance and the obedience of 
one who goes forward into that life, himself 
thoroughly believing in it — for Jesus believed in 
it with all His human soul. 

June 4. 

You are to cultivate yourself for the sake of 
your fellow-men, and you are to serve your fellow- 
men for the sake of your own self-culture. 

June 5. 
Let me know Christ, let me be Chrises ; then 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 95 

shall come the enthusiasm without my trying to 
lift up my voice ; then shall come the energy 
without my even stretching out my hand. 

June 6. 

What is it that has happened to you, my 
Christian friend, my Christian brother, in these 
days in which your whole soul rejoices? You 
have been filled with Christ, you have been lifted 
up into a union with Him, that beats with the 
beating of His heart, shines with the impulse and 
enthusiam of His desires. What has happened 
to you ? Are you less a man than you used to 
be ? Has your manhood been destroyed, and 
some strange, unknown thing put in its place? 
Do those of your brethren who are around you 
look at you and wonder how you have become 
so, how you have undergone that astonishing 
change ? Nay, in every step which you take, in 
every word that you speak, in every touch of 
your life upon every other life, do not you and 



96 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

those around you know that you have come a 
little nearer, — not yet to the fulfillment, but a 
little nearer — to the wondrous thing which it is 
to be a man ? 

June 7. 

"Is it right that a man should entirely sacrifice 
himself to his fellow-men ? Is it right that a 
man should give away his life in order that his 
brethren may be saved ? ' ' We see it in many 
ways, with a thousand meanings — that vast truth ; 
but when we carry it on to its fullest interpreta- 
tion, it is an awful doctrine, a doctrine that it is 
inconceivable that God should teach His children. 
God can never really sacrifice the essential ful- 
filment of any life to the service which it could 
render to any other life. Much I may be called 
upon to give up, much I may be called upon to 
surrender. I may surrender my comfort, my 
means, my time, my cultivation. But myself I 
have no right to give entirely to any man, to give 
for the growth of my fellow-men. God never 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 97 

can ask a man to give his own true life, his own 
real self, his own essential and absolute self, the 
fulness of his own life, even for the salvation of 
the world. It is the story of the great man's 
life ; it was the story of the divine life of Jesus. 
He gave Himself absolutely for man, but He 
never gave Himself away to man. He never 
sacrificed that which belonged to His Father. 

June 8. 

Why am I to cultivate myself ? Simply that I 
may make this knowledge of myself the most 
complete of all the things here on earth, as per- 
fect as I can ? Why am I to serve my fellow- 
men ? Because I would help them a little in the 
struggles which would lift them toward God? 
Both of them are reasons ; but both lie within 
the one great reason which exists in the mystery 
of the union of all men, and the existence of all 
life, in God. I am to serve myself, I am to 
educate myself, because I am a part of God, be- 



98 SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

cause I am fulfilling this life, which is a part of 
God's life. 

June 9. 

It is true of every great nature which in its 
development finds some difficulties, some obscuri- 
ties, some anomalies, that it is to escape from 
those obscurities and difficulties only by making 
itself greater, and not by making itself less. 

June 10. 

I understand perfectly well the stories which 
men tell us of the tremendous struggle that has 
shaken them, body and soul. If only they could 
come into the presence of their Father ! But I 
know that no such struggle is a necessary experi- 
ence of the human life. I know that the great 
life of man, coming near to God, is meant to be 
the most natural fulfilment of his human exist- 
ence. I will think no man's experience an un- 
natural one, because it has not been shaken by 
terrors and by fears. I know that the experience 



SELECTIONS EROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 99 

which pictures all our experience, opened, under 
the skies of Nazareth and on the sweet waters of 
the Lake of Galilee, peacefully and calmly into 
the perfect knowledge that He and the Father 
were absolutely one. 

June 11. 

" Aye, but sin ! " you say. Yes, sin. And so 
it may be that through' jungles and through 
briers and morasses you must find your way to 
Him. But let not your eye be upon the jungle 
under your feet, but upon the certain light that 
shines beyond. 

June 12. 

Men have recognized that word of Christ, and 
found the fulfilment of it in their own lives ; and 
that has been the Christian religion, — just exactly 
what it was in the old days when Jesus was present 
in Jerusalem and Galilee. Just exactly what men 
did then, men have been doing in all the genera- 
tions that have come since. Just exactly what 



IOO SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

was possible then is possible for them now — that 
we may become the followers of that same Christ 
and the receivers through Him of the divine life, 
by which alone the human life is perfected and 
fulfilled. 

June 13. 

Come home and strive for greater nobleness, 
and the bond between your human life and other 
human lives will call you forth again and show 
you how large a part of your fulfilment lies in 
other natures. 

June 14. 

Shall I sit down in my study and say, "I am 
to make myself the very best man, the fullest man 
that I possibly can, in order that I may do some 
work with myself by and by?" On the other 
hand, shall I go out to my dealings with the 
world, and serve my fellow-men, in order that I 
may serve myself? " 

We must come back to our Lord again, and 
everything becomes clear in that very clearest life 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. IOI 

which is our perpetual inspiration and study. 
Christ was cultivating Jesus of Nazareth, and yet 
was remembering the fellow-men who were around 
him in Jerusalem and Galilee. But all this was 
subject to and governed by His entire consecra- 
tion to His God. 

June 15. 

I shall find the fellow-men whom I served, 
when I look forth, not simply into their pinched 
and haggard faces here on the street, not simply 
into the social conditions under which I see them 
laboring, but when I see them in the idea of their 
existence, and think of them and all people as 
comprehended in and forming part of the exist- 
ence of God. 

June 16. 

We crave freedom. We believe that only in 
freedom will mankind fulfil its best life. But 
freedom immediately brings its difficulties, its 
contradictions, its disturbances, where before 
everything has seemed to be consistency and 
9 



102 SEXKCTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. 

peace. How shall we escape from the dangers of 
liberty ? Shall it be by restricting liberty ? No, 
but by increasing liberty. So mankind shall learn 
to escape the dangers of liberty only by making 
man more free. The dangers of liberty are only 
to be overcome when it has reached a stage 
higher than any partial development which it has 
yet attained — when it has reached it full and 
glorious development. 

June 17. 

The great richness of nature, the great richness 
of life, comes when we understand that behind 
every specific action of man there is some one 
of the more elemental and primary forces of the 
universe that are always trying to express them- 
selves. 

June 18. 

Self-culture is going to escape from the dangers 
of self-culture only by becoming a deeper power 
of self-culture, and self-sacrifice is going to escape 



SELECTIONS FROM PHIIJJPS BROOKS. I03 

from its dangers only by sacrificing itself more 
completely. In order to cultivate himself more 
completely the man is to sacrifice himself more 
completely. In order to sacrifice himself more 
completely, he is to cultivate himself more com- 
pletely. These two great principles of existence 
will only come into harmony with one another in 
mutually ministering to one another, as they pour 
themselves out together and mingle with one 
another, and find themselves a part of the great 
plan of God. 

June 19. 

I do some work for my fellow-men to-day, and 
I am a better fulfilment of the purpose that God 
had in my existence; I come to a fuller comple- 
tion of myself; I am fitter for some of the work 
that this great, hungry, needy, crying world de- 
mands. 

June 20. 

I know that there is no greater conception of 
any great fact in this world which man can know 



104 SELECTIONS FROM PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

to be true, which he does not know by that 
higher faculty of faith. Ah, faith ! the word 
that we dishonor, the word that really is the 
glory of our life — "the substance of things 
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. ,, 

June 21. 

I dare to believe that there are young men 
who, failing to be touched by every promise of 
their own salvation and every threatening of their 
own damnation, will still lift themselves up and 
take upon them the duty of men, and be soldiers 
of Jesus Christ, and have a part in the battle, 
and have a part somewhere in the victory that is 
sure to come. Don't be selfish anywhere. Don't 
be selfish, most of all, in your religion. Let 
yourselves free into your religion, and be utterly 
unselfish. 

June 22. 

The soul that trifles and toys with self-sacrifice 
never can get its true joy and power. Only the 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. IO5 

soul that, with .an overwhelming impulse and a 
perfect trust, gives itself up forever to the life of 
other men, finds the delight and peace which 
such complete self-surrender has to give. 

June 23. 

Oh, seek independence. Insist upon indepen- 
dence. Insist that you will not be the slave of 
the poor, petty standards of your fellow-men. 
But insist upon it only in the way in which it 
can be insisted upon, by becoming absolutely the 
servant of their needs. 

June 24. 

Jesus Christ comes to us in the noblest part of 
our nature, and claims us there for our true life 
within Himself. 

June 25. 

Because you must worship, therefore you must 
have God. 



106 SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. 

June 26. 

Let us come under the inspiration of Jesus 
Christ Himself, who says to us, in these words 
which we have repeatedly read to one another, 
that it is the truth that is to make us free, and 
that the entrance of the man therefore into that 
freedom is the largest freedom of every region of 
man's life. 

June 27. 

I want to claim, that which I believe with all 
my soul, that he who lives in the faith of Jesus 
Christ lives in the freest action of his mental 
powers, and there sees before him and makes 
himself a part of the large world into which man 
shall enter, in which he has perfect liberty and 
can exercise his powers as he could never have 
exercised them without. 

June 28. 

The only way to be sure that God gave us our 
physical life is to let Him give us the spiritual 



SELECTIONS FROM PHILIPS BROOKS. IO7 

life which shall declare for the physical life an 
adequate and worthy purpose. 

June 29. 

Christ can give the world the thing it needs in 
unknown ways and methods that we have not yet 
begun to suspect. 

June 30. 

Read your own nature deeper and you will un- 
derstand your Christ. * * * God bless you 
and go with you wherever you go. Speak great 
things, but know that many things that the world 
calls little are great things. To so live and at the 
end to know, or not to know, that one soul in 
God's world is better for our having lived, — that 
is enough. 



DAILY THOUGHTS 



FROM 



HENRY DRUMMOND, F.R.S.E., F.G.S. 



WITH A 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



^ BAI/TIMORK : 
R. H. WOODWARD & COMPANY. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

OF 

HENRY DRUMMOND, F.R.S.E., F.G.S. 



PROFESSOR DRUMMOND was born in Stir- 
ling, Scotland, in the year 1851. His father 
Was a justice of the peace. At an early age he de- 
veloped a desire for serious study, and after some 
preparation in the schools, at home, he was sent 
to the University of Edinburgh, and afterwards to 
Tubingen, Germany. At both places, his rare 
gifts marked him out among his classmates as a 
young man of especial promise. Having deter- 
mined on a ministerial career, he passed through 
the Free Church Divinity Hall, and after his or- 
dination was appointed to a mission-station at 

113 



114 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF 

Malta. Here he employed his leisure in the pur- 
suit of his favorite studies, Theology and Science, 
boldly grappling with the problems presented by 
the most recent researches and developments of 
the latter in the effort to seek a reconciliation 
with the spirit and essence of the former. 

The result of these studies was made apparent 
when, on his return to Scotland in 1877, the 
brilliant young man, barely twenty-six years of 
age, was appointed Lecturer in Science at the 
Free Church College in Glasgow. It was yet 
more apparent when, in 1883, the free fruition of 
his thought and experience was presented to the 
world in a remarkable book entitled " Natural 
Laws in the Spiritual World." This book might 
be looked upon as in some sort an amplification 
of the theme which Tennyson also had chosen in 
that magnificent though illy-named poem, "The 
Higher Pantheism/ ' and might have taken for 
its text the pregnant line, 

And if God thunders by law, the thunder is still His voice. 



HENRY DRUMMOND. 115 

The book was at once received with great favor. 
It was republished in America. It was translated 
into French, German, Dutch and Norwegian. 
He became Professor of Science in the Free 
Church College in 1884. 

In 1889 he was invited to make an address at 
Moody's College at Oxford. This address was en- 
titled, " The Greatest Thing in the World." Its 
publication in book form was instantly demanded. 
Slight as was the pamphlet in bulk, its success 
more than repeated the success of his first literary 
effort. Nearly a quarter of a million copies were 
sold in Great Britain alone. It is significant of 
the author's modesty, self-restraint and singleness 
of mind that while the public is clamoring for 
every line he may choose to give them he with- 
holds the manuscript of numerous addresses, 
spoken but never printed, and that his published 
books represent only the merest fraction of his 
intellectual life-work. 

Prof. Drummond has a singular union of gifts. 



Il6 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF 

As a rule, the glory of the orator is one thing, 
and the glory of the writer is another. Prof. 
Drummond is one of the few brilliant exceptions 
to that rule. How often do we find the impas- 
sioned sentences of the orator turn cold and life- 
less in the printed page ! How often does the 
brilliant writer seem stilted and unnatural in 
spoken word ! 

Judged as a writer, he has command of a 
vigorous, nervous, flexible style. His words are 
simple, he loves monsyllables more than polysyl- 
lables, and Saxon more than Latin. He has a 
wealth of illustrations to draw upon — illustrations 
that are worthy of the name and do illustrate, do 
cast a flood of light upon his meaning. Yet 
these illustrations are of the homeliest sort. They 
are drawn from life more than from books. They 
are not stock figures of speech. They are the 
fruit of long and minute observation ; they indi- 
cate a brain that is ever active to seize the mul- 
tiple analogies presented by the world around us. 



HENRY DRUMMOND. 117 

The author has thought and studied much, but 
he has seen more. He does not misjudge his 
audience. He makes no ostentatious effort to 
soar above them, nor is he guilty of any ostenta- 
tious condescension. He says his say in straight, 
honest fashion ; his rhetoric has a robust sincerity 

that convinces as well as thrills. 
10 



DAILY THOUGHTS. 



July i. 

Whenever you attempt a good work you will 
find other men doing the same kind of work, 
and probably doing it better. Envy them not. 
Envy is a feeling of ill-will to those who are in 
the same line as ourselves, a spirit of covetous- 
ness and detraction. How little Christian work 
even is a protection against un- Christian feeling ! 
That most despicable of all the unworthy moods 
which cloud a Christian's soul assuredly waits for 
for us on the threshold of every work, unless we 
are fortified with this grace of magnanimity. 
Only one thing truly need the Christian envy, 
the large, rich, generous soul which " envieth 
not." 

July 2. 

All around us Christians are wearing themselves 
out in trying to be better. The amount of spir- 



122 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

itual longing in the world — in the hearts of un- 
numbered thousands of men and women in whom 
we should never suspect it ; among the wise and 
thoughtful ; among the young and gay, who seldom 
assuage and never betray their thirst — this is one 
of the most wonderful and touching facts of life. 

July 3- 

" Seekest thou great things for thyself? " said 
the prophet ; ' 6 seek them not. ' ' Why ? Because 
there is no greatness in things. Things cannot 
be great. The only greatness is unselfish love. 

July 4. 

He that would be happy, let him remember 
that there is but one way — it is more blessed, it is 
more happy, to give than to receive. 

July 5- 

Do not grudge the hand that is moulding the 
still too shapeless image within you. It is grow- 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 23 

ing more beautiful, though you see it not, and 
every touch of temptation may add to its perfec- 
tion. 

July 6. 

Try to give up the idea that religion comes to 
us by chance, or by mystery, or by caprice. It 
comes to us by natural law, or by supernatural 
law, for all law is Divine. 

July 7. 

Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. 
It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of 
the whole round Christian character — the Christ- 
like nature in its fullest development. And the 
constituents of this great character are only to be 
built up by ceaseless practice. 

July 8. 

As memory scans the past, above and beyond 
all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap for- 
ward those supreme hours when you have been 



124 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND- 

enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those 
round about you, things too trifling to speak 
about, but which you feel have entered into your 
eternal life, 

July 9- 

Who is Christ ? He who fed the hungry, 
clothed the naked, visited the sick. And where 
is Christ ? Where ? — whoso shall receive a little 
child in My name receiveth Me. And who are 
Christ's? Every one that loveth is born of God. 

July 10. 

Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid 
fluids out, but by putting something in — a great 
Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. 

July ii. 

To be lost is to live in an unregenerate condi- 
tion, loveless and unloved , and to be saved is to 
love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth 
already in God. For God is Love. 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 125 

July 12. 

Two painters each painted a picture to illus- 
trate his conception of rest. The first choose for 
his scene a still, lone lake among the far-off 
mountains. The second threw on his canvas a 
thundering water-fall, with a fragile birch tree 
bending over the foam ; at the fork of a branch, 
almost wet with the cataract's spray, a robin sat 
on its nest. The first was only Stagnation ; the 
last was Rest, For in Rest there are always two 
elements — tranquility and energy; silence and 
turbulence ; creation and destruction ; fearless- 
ness and fearfulness. Thus it was in Christ.. 

July 13- 

There is only one thing greater than happi- 
ness in the world, and that is holiness. 

July 14. 

Christ's invitation to the weary and heavy- 
laden is a call to begin life over again upon a new 



126 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

principle —upon His own principle. " Watch 
My way of doing things/' He says. "Follow 
Me. Take life as I take it. Be meek and lowly 
and you will find Rest. ' ' 

July 15. 

Christianity as Christ taught is the truest phi- 
losophy of life ever spoken. But let us be quite 
sure when we speak of Christianity that we mean 
Christ's Christianity. 

July 16. 

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and 
to love forever is to live forever. 

July 17. 

Men can be to other men as the shadow of a 
great rock in a thirsty land. Much more Christ ; 
much more Christ as Perfect Man; much more 
still as Saviour of the world. 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND 1 27 

July 18. 

Through whatever media it reaches us, all true 
joy and gladness find their source in Christ. 

July 19. 

Christ is the source of Joy to men in the sense 
in which He is the source of Rest. His people 
share His life, and therefore share its conse- 
quences, and one of these is Joy. 

July 20. 

Joy lay in mere constant living in Christ's 
presence, with all that that implied of peace, of 
shelter and of love ; partly in the influence of that 
Life upon mind and character and will ; and 
partly in the inspiration to live and work for 
others, with all that that brings of self-riddance 
and Joy in others' gain. All these, in different 
ways and at different times, are sources of pure 
Happiness. 



128 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

July 21. 

You will find, if you think for a moment, that 
the people who influence you are people who be- 
lieve in you. 

July 22. 

Christ saw that men took life painfully. To 
some it was a weariness, to others a failure, to 
many a tragedy, to all a struggle and a pain. 
How to carry this burden of life had been the 
whole world's problem. And here is Christ's 
solution : " Carry it as I do. Take life as I take 
it. Look at it from My point of view. Interpret 
it upon My principles. Take My yoke and learn 
of Me, and you will find it easy. For My yoke 
is easy, works easily, sits right upon the shoulders, 
and therefore Mv burden is light.' ' 

July 23. 

Since we are what we are by the impacts of 
those who surround us, those who surround them- 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 29 

selves with the highest will be those who change 
into the highest. 

July 24. 

The infallible receipt for Happiness is to do 
good ; and the infallible receipt for doing good 
is to abide in Christ. The surest proof that all 
this is a plain matter of Cause and Effect is that 
men may try every other conceivable way of find- 
ing Happiness, and they will fail. Only the right 
cause in each case can produce the right effect. 
There is no mystery about Happiness whatever. 
Put in the right ingredients and it must come 
out. He that abideth in Him will bring forth 
much fruit; and bringing forth much fruit is 
Happiness. 

July 25. 

If you love you will unconsciously fulfil the 
whole law. 

July 26. 

We all reflecting as a mirror the character of 
Christ are transformed into the same Image from 



I30 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

character to character — from a poor character to 
a better one, from a better one to one a little 
better still, from that to one still more complete, 
until by slow degrees the Perfect Image is at- 
tained. 

July 27. 

To copy virtues one by one has somewhat the 
same effect as eradicating the vices one by one ; 
the temporary result is an overbalanced and in- 

o 

congruous character. 

Character is a unity, and all the virtues must 
advance together to make the perfect man. 

July 28. 

To live with Socrates — with unveiled face — 
must have made one wise ; with Aristides, just. 
Francis of Assisi must have made one gentle; 
Savonarola, strong. But to have lived with 
Christ must have made one like Christ ; that is 
to say, A Christian, 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 131 

July 29. 

As the man is to the animal in the slowness of 
his evolution, so is the spiritual man to the 
natural man. Foundations which have to bear 
the weight of an eternal life must be surely laid. 
Character is to wear for ever ; who will wonder 
or grudge that it cannot be developed in a day ? 

July 30. 

A religion of effortless adoration may be a re- 
ligion for an angel, but never for a man. Not in 
the contemplative, but in the active, lies true 
hope ; not in rapture, but in reality, lies true life ; 
not in the realm of ideals, but among tangible 
things, is man's sanctification wrought. 

July 31- 

The mind, the memory, the soul, is simply a 
vast chamber panelled with looking-glass. And 
upon this miraculous arrangement and " endow- 



I32 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

ment depends the capacity of mortal souls to " re- 
flect the character of the Lord." 

August 1. 

No man can change himself. Throughout the 
New Testament you will find that wherever these 
moral and spiritual transformations are described 
the verbs are in the passive. Not more certain is 
it that it is something outside the thermometer 
that produces a change in the thermometer, than 
it is something outside the soul of man that pro- 
duces a moral change upon him. 

August 2. 
The kingdom of God is not going to religious 
meetings, and hearing strange religious experi- 
ences ; the kingdom of God is doing what is 
right — living at peace with all men, being filled 
with joy in the Holy Ghost. 

August 3. 

The Image of Christ that is forming within 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND, 1 33 

us — that is life's one charge. Let every project 
stand aside for that. " Till Christ be formed,' ' 
no man's work is finished, no religion crowned, 
no life has fulfilled its end. Is the infinite task 
begun? When, how, are we to be different? 
Time cannot change men. Death cannot change 
men. Christ can. Wherefore put on Christ 

August 4. 

It is for active service soldiers are drilled and 
trained and fed and armed. That is why you 
and I are in the world at all — not to prepare to 
go out of it some day ; but to serve God actively 
in it now. 

August 5. 

If my brother is short-sighted, I must not 

abuse him nor speak against him; I must pity 

him, and, if possible, try to improve his sight or 

to make things that he is to look at so bright 

that he cannot help seeing. 
11 



1J4 SElyKCTlONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

August 6. 

Christ never failed to distinguish between 
doubt and unbelief. Doubt is can't believe; 
unbelief is won't believe. Doubt is honesty; 
unbelief is obstinacy. 

August 7. 

Banish for ever from your minds the idea that 
religion is subtraction. It does not tell us to 
give things up, but rather gives us something so 
much better that they give themselves up. 

August 8. 

Keep religion in its place, and it will take you 
straight through life, and straight to your Father 
in heaven when life is over. * * * Religion 
out of its place in human life is the most misera- 
ble thing in the world. There is nothing that 
requires so much to be kept in its place as re- 
ligion, and its place is what ? second ? third ? 
" First." 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 135 

August 9. 

We are, of course, not responsible for every- 
thing that is said in the name of Christianity ; 
but a man does not give up medicine because 
there are quack doctors, and no man has a right 
to give up his Christianity because there are 
spurious or inconsistent Christians. 

August 10. 

Truth is not a product of the intellect alone ; 
it is a product of the whole nature. * * It 
would be a pity if all these problems could be 
solved. The joy of the intellectual life would 
be largely gone. I would not rob a man of his 
problems, nor would I have another man rob me of 
my problems. They are the delight of life, and 
the whole intellectual world would be stale and 
unprofitable if we knew everything. 

August 11. 
Many a man thinks he is looking at truth when 



136 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

he is only looking at the spectacles he has put on 
to see it with. 

August 12. 

It will never do to exaggerate one truth at the 
expense of another, and a truth may be turned 
into a falsehood very, very easily, by simply being 
either too much enlarged or too much diminished. 

August 13. 

Your views are just what you see with your 
own eyes, and my views are just what I see ; and 
what I see depends on just where I stand, and 
what you see depends on just where you stand. 

August 14. 

If any of you want to know how to begin to 
be a Christian, all I can say is that >ou should 
begin to do the next thing you find to be done 
as Christ would have done it. 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 37 

August 15. 

What can be gathered on the surface as to the 
process of Regeneration in the individual soul? 
From the analogies of Biology we should expect 
three things: First, that the New Life should 
dawn suddenly; second, that it should come 
"without observation ;' ' third, that it should 
develop gradually. On two of these points 
there can be little controversy. The gradual- 
ness of growth is a characteristic which strikes 
the simplest observer. Long before the word 
Evolution was coined Christ applied it in this very 
connection — " First the blade, then the ear, then 
the full corn in the ear." Growth is most 
gradual in the highest forms. Man attains his 
maturity after a score of years ; the monad com- 
pletes its humble cycle in a day. What wonder 
if development be tardy in the Creature of Eter- 
nity ! A Christian's sun has sometimes set, and 
a critical world has seen, as yet, no corn in the 
ear. As yet? "As yet," in this long Life, has 



I3S SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

not begun. Grant him the years proportionate 
to his place in the scale of Life. " The time of 
harvest is not yet. " 

August 16. 

There is only one great character in the world 
that can really draw out all that is best in man. 
He is so far above all others in influencing men 
for good that He stands alone. That man was 
the founder of Christianity. To be a Christian 
man is to have that Character for our ideal in 
life, to live under its influence, to do what He 
would wish us to do, to live the kind of life He 
would have lived in our house, and had He our 
day's routine to go through. It would not, per- 
haps, alter the forms of our life, but it would 
alter the spirit and aims and motives of our life, 
and the Christian man is he who in that sense 
lives under the influence of Jesus Christ 

August 17. 

It is not worth seeking the kingdom of God 
unless we seek it first. 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. I39 

August 18. 

Causes and effects are eternal arrangements, 
set in the constitution of the world ; fixed beyond 
man's ordering. What man can do is to place 
himself in the midst of a chain of sequences. 
Thus he can get things to grow : thus he himself 
can grow. But the grower is the Spirit of God. 

August 19. 

The test of value of the different verities of 
truth depends upon one thing ; whether they 
have or have not a sanctifying power. 

August 20. 

What is it that saves the life of the world from 
being utterly rotten, but the Christian elements 
that are in it ? 

August 21. 

Why is Love greater than faith ? Because the 
end is greater than the means. And why is it 



140 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

greater than charity? Because the whole is 
greater than the part. Love is greater than faith, 
because the end is greater than the means. What 
is the use of having faith ? It is to connect the 
soul with God. And what is the object of con- 
necting man with God ? That he may become 
like God. But God is Love. Hence Faith, the 
means, is in order to Love, the end. 

AugUSt 22. 

" Love is the fulfilling of the law." It is the 
rule for fulfilling all rules, the new commandment 
for keeping all the old commandments, Christ's 
one secret of the Christian life. 

August 23. 

What a noble gift it is, the power of playing 
upon the souls and wills of men, and rousing 
them to lofty purposes and holy deeds. Paul 
says, " If I speak with the tongues of men and 
of angels, and have not love, I am become as 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. I4I 

sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." And we 
all know why. We have all felt the brazenness 
of words without emotion, the. hollowness, the 
unaccountable unpersuasiveness, of eloquence 
behind which lies no Love. 

August 24. 

If a truth makes a man a better man, then let 

him focus upon it and get all the acquaintance 

with it he can. 

August 25. 

The spirit of Christ was the scientific spirit. 
He founded His religion upon facts; and He 
asked all men to found their religion upon facts. 
Now, gentlemen, get up the facts of Christianity, 
and take men to the facts. 

August 26. 

We hear much of love to God ; Christ spoke 
much of love to man. We make a great deal of 
peace with heaven ; Christ made much of peace 
on earth. 



142 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

August 27. 

Take into your sphere of labor, where you 
also mean to lay down your life, that simple 
charm, Love, and your life-work must succeed. 

August 28. 

Spiritual Life is not something outside our- 
selves. The idea is not that Christ is in heaven, 
and that we can stretch out some mysterious fac- 
ulty and deal with Him there. This is the 
vague form in which many conceive the truth, 
but it is contrary to Christ's teaching and to the 
analogy of nature. Vegetable Life is not con- 
tained in a reservoir somewhere in the skies, and 
measured out spasmodically at certain seasons. 
The Life is in every plant and tree, inside its own 
substance and tissue, and continues there until it 
dies. Life is not one of the homeless forces 
which promiscuously inhabit space, or which can 
be gathered like electricity from the clouds and 
dissipated back again into space. Life is definite 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 143 

and resident ; and Spiritual Life is not a visit 
from a force, but a resident tenant in the soul. 

August 29. 
It is the man who is the missionary, it is not 

his words. 

August 30. 

What do you say to a man when he says to 
you, "Why do you believe in miracles?" I 
sa/, " Because I have seen them/' He says, 
< ' When ? M I say, ' ' Yesterday. ' ' He says, 
" Where ?" "Down such-and-such a street I 
saw a man who was a drunkard redeemed by the 
power of an unseen Christ and saved from sin. 
That is a miracle." There are fifty other argu- 
ments for miracles, but none so good as that you 
have seen them. Perhaps you are one yourself. 
But take you a man and show him a miracle with 
his own eyes. Then he will believe. 

August 31: 
Where Love is, God is. He that dwelleth in 



144 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

Love dwelleth in God. God is Love. There- 
fore love. 

September i. 

If a man neglect himself for a few years he will 
change into a worse man and a lower man. If it 
is his body that he neglects, he will deteriorate 
into a wild and bestial savage — like the dehuman- 
ized men who are discovered sometimes upon 
desert islands. If it is his mind, it will degen- 
erate into imbecility and madness — solitary con- 
finement has the power to unmake men's minds 
and leave them idiots. If he neglect his con- 
science, it will run off into lawlessness and vice. 
Or, lastly, if it is his soul, it must inevitably atro- 
phy, drop off in ruin and decay. 

We have here, then, a thoroughly natural basis 
for the question before us. If we neglect, with 
this universal principle staring us in the face, how 
shall we escape ? So, if we neglect the soul, how 
shall it escape the natural retrograde movement, 
the inevitable relapse into barrenness and death ? 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 145 

i i How shall we escape if we neglect so great 
salvation ? " — Hebrews. 

September 2. 

Have you ever noticed how much of Christ's 
life was spent in doing kind things — in merely 
doing kind things ? Run over it with that in 
view, and you will find that He spent a great pro- 
portion of His time simply in making people 
happy, in doing good turns to people. What God 
has put in our power is the happiness of those 
about us, and that is largely to be secured by our 
being kind to them. 

September 3. 

Christ's life outwardly was one of the most 
troubled lives that was ever lived. Tempest and 
tumult, tumult arfd tempest, the waves breaking 
over it all the time, till the worn body was laid 
in the grave. But the inner life was a sea of 
glass. The great calm was always there. At any 



146 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

moment you might have gone to Him and found 
Rest. 

September 4. 

If a man does not exercise his arm he develops 
no biceps muscle ; and if a man does not exercise 
his soul, he requires no muscle in his soul, no 
strength of character, no vigor of moral fibre, nor 
beauty of spiritual guards. 

September 5. 

For a want of patience, a want of kindness, a 
want of generosity, a want of courtesy, a want of 
unselfishness, are all instantaneously symbolized 
in one flash of Temper. 

September 6. 

Christ never said much in mere words about 
the Christian Graces. He lived them, He was 
them. We learn His art by living with Him, 
like the old apprentices with their masters. 



S£l,ECTlONS FROM DRUMMOND. 147 

September 7. 

Remain side by side with Him who loved us, 
and gave Himself for us, and you too will become 
a permanent magnet, a permanently attractive 
force ; and like Him you will draw all men unto 
you, like Him you will be drawn unto all men. 
That is the inevitable effect of Love. Any man 
who fulfills that cause must have that effect pro- 
duced in him. 

September 8. 

" Love does not behave itself unseemly. ,, Po- 
liteness has been denned as love in trifles. Cour- 
tesy is said to be love in little things. And the 
one secret of politeness is to love. 

September 9. 

The test of religion, the final test of religion, is 
not religiousness, but Love. I say the final test of 
religion at that great Day is not religiousness, but 
Love ; not what I have done, not what I have 



I48 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

believed, not what I have achieved, but how I 
have discharged the common charities of life. 
Sins of commission in that awful indictment are 
not even referred to. By what we have not done, 
by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not 
be otherwise. For the withholding of love is the 
negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof that we 
never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. 

September 10. 

Thank God the Christianity of to-day is coming 
nearer the world's need. Live to help that on. 

September 11. 

The Gospel offers a man life. Never offer 
men a thimbleful of Gospel. Do not offer them 
merely joy, or merely peace, or merely rest, or 
merely safety ; tell them how Christ came to 
give men a more abundant life than they have, a 
life abundant in love, and therefore abundant in 
salvation for themselves, and large in enterprise 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. I49 

for the alleviation and redemption of the world. 
Then only can the Gospel take hold of the 
whole of a man, body, soul, and spirit, and give 
to each part of his nature its exercise and reward. 

September 12. 

What we are stretches past what we do, be- 
yond what we possess. 

September 13. 

I do not think we ourselves are aware how 
much our religious life is made up of phrases ; 
how much of what we call Christian experience 
is only a dialect of the Churches, a mere religious 
phraseology with almost nothing behind it in 
what we really feel and know. 

September 14. 

Put a seal upon your lips and forget what you 

have done. After you have been kind, after 

Love has stolen forth into the world and done its 
12 



I50 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

beautiful work, go back into the shade again and 
say nothing about it. Love hides even from 
itself. 

September 15. 

The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centred life can 
be removed at once by learning Meekness and 
Lowliness of heart. He who learns them is for 
ever proof against it. He lives henceforth a 
charmed life. 

September 16. 

Because He loved us, we love, we love every- 
body. Our heart is slowly changed. Contemplate 
the love of Christ, and you will love. Stand be- 
fore that mirror, reflect Christ's character, and 
you will be changed into the same image from 
tenderness to tenderness. There is no other way. 

September 17. 

That is the supreme work to which we need to 
address ourselves in this world, to learn Love. Is 
life not full of opportunities for learning Love ? 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. I5I 

Every man and woman every day has a thousand 
of them. The world is not a playground ; it is 
a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an edu- 
cation. And the one eternal lesson for us all is 
how better we can love. 

September 18. 

You will give yourselves to many things, give 
yourself first to Love. Hold things in their pro- 
portion. Let at least the first great object of our 
lives be to achieve the character defended in 
these words, the character — and it is the charac- 
ter of Christ — which is built round Love. 

September 19. 

How can modern men to-day make Christ, the 
absent Christ, their most constant companion 
still ? The answer is that Friendship is a spiritual 
thing. It is independent of Matter, or Space, 
or Time. That which I love in my friend is not 



152 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

that which I see. What influences me in my 
friend is not his body, but his spirit. 

September 20. 

The influences we meet are not simply held for 
a moment on the polished surface and thrown off 
again into space. Each is retained where first it 
fell, and stored up in the soul for ever. 

September 21. 

My hidden ideals of what is beautiful I have 
drawn from Christ. 

September 22. 

A Science without mystery is unknown ; a Re- 
ligion without mystery is absurd. There is no 
attempt to reduce Religion to a question of 
mathematics, or demonstrate God in biological 
formulae. The elimination of mystery from the 
universe is the elimination of Religion. How- 
ever far the scientific method may penetrate the 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND 153 

Spiritual World, there will always remain a region 
to be explored by a scientific faith. "I shall 
never rise to the point of view which wishes to 
'raise 7 faith to knowledge. To me the way of 
truth is to come through the knowledge of my 
ignorance to the submissiveness of faith, and 
then, making that my starting place, to raise my 
knowledge into faith.' ' 

September 23. 

Character is a thing built up by slow degrees, 
that it is hourly changing for better or for worse, 
according to the images which flit across it. 

September 24. 

He that would be happy, let him remember 
that there is but one way — it is more blessed, it 
is more happy, to give than to receive. 

September 25. 
Theology is searching on every hand for an- 



154 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

other echo of the Voice of which Revelation also 
is the echo, that out of the mouths of two wit- 
nesses its truths should be established. That 
other echo can only come from Nature. 

September 26. 

We have Truth in Nature as it came from God. 
And it has to be read with the same unbiassed 
mind, the same open eye, the same faith, and the 
same reverence as all other Revelation. 

September 27. 

The soul, which has no correspondence with 
the spiritual environment, is spiritually dead. It 
may be that it never possessed the spiritual eye or 
the spiritual ear, or a heart which throbbed in 
response to the love of God. If so, having 
never lived, it cannot be said to have died. But 
not to have these correspondences is to be in the 
state of Death. To the spiritual world, to the 
Divine Environment, it is dead — as a stone which 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 155 

has never lived is dead to the environment of the 
organic world. 

September 28. 

To every man who truly studies Nature there 
is a God. Call Him by whatever name — a 
Creator, a Supreme Being, a Great First Cause, a 
Power that makes for Righteousness — Science has 
a God ; and he who believes in this, in spite of 
all protest, possesses a theology. 

September 29. 

There is, for example, a Sense of Sight in the 
religious nature. Neglect this, leave it unde- 
veloped, and you never miss it. You simply see 
nothing. But develop it and you see God. And 
the line along which to develop it is known to us. 
Become pure in heart. The pure in heart shall 
see God. Here, then, is one opening for soul- 
culture — the avenue through purity of heart to 
the spiritual seeing of God. 



I56 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

September 30. 

Then there is a Sense of Sound. Neglect this, 
leave it undeveloped, and you never miss it. You 
simply hear nothing. Develop it, and you hear 
God. And the line along which to develop it is 
known to us. Obey Christ. Become one of 
Christ's flock. " The sheep hear His voice, and 
He calleth them by name." Here, then, is an- 
other opportunity for the culture of the soul — a 
gateway through the Shepherd's fold to hear the 
Shepherd's voice. 

October 1. * 

And there is a Sense of Touch to be acquired — 
such a sense as the woman had who touched the 
hem of Christ's garment, that wonderful electric 
touch called faith, which moves the very heart of 
God. 

October 2. 

And there is a Sense of Taste — a spiritual 
hunger after God ; a something within which 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 157 

tastes and sees that He is good. And there is 
the talent for Inspiration. Neglect that, and all 
the scenery of the spiritual world is flat and 
frozen. And last of all there is the great capacity 
for Love, even for the love of God — the expand- 
ing capacity for feeling more and more its height 
and depth, its length and breadth. Till that is 
felt no man can really understand that word, " so 
great salvation/ ' for what is its measure but that 
other "so" of Christ — God so loved the world 
that He gave His only begotten Son ? Verily, 
how shall we escape if we neglect that ? 

October 3. 

A doctor has no prescription for growth. He 
can tell me how growth may be stunted or im- 
paired, but the process itself is recognized as be- 
yond control — one of the few, and therefore very 
significant, things which. Nature keeps in her own 
hands. No physician of souls, in like manner, 
has any prescription for spiritual growth. It is 



158 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

the question he is most often asked and most 
often answers wrongly. He may prescribe more 
earnestness, more prayer, more self-denial or 
more Christian work. These are prescriptions 
for something, but not for growth. Not that 
they may not encourage growth; but the soul 
grows as the lily grows, without trying, without 
fretting, without ever thinking. There can indeed 
be no other principle of growth than this. It is 
a vital act. And to try to make a thing grow is as 
absurd as to help the tide to come in or the sunrise. 

October 4. 

There are certain burrowing animals — the mole, 
for instance — which have taken to spending their 
lives beneath the surface of the ground. And 
Nature has taken her revenge upon them in a 
thoroughly natural way — she nas closed up their 
eyes. If they mean to live in darkness, she 
argues, eyes are obviously a superfluous function. 
By neglecting them these animals made it clear 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 59 

they do not want them. And as one of Nature's 
fixed principles is that nothing shall exist in vain, 
the eyes are presently taken away, or reduced to 
a rudimentary state. There are fishes also which 
have had to pay the same terrible forfeit for hav- 
ing made their abode in dark caverns where eyes 
can never be required. And in exactly the same 
way the spiritual eye must die and lose its power 
by purely natural law, if the soul chooses to walk 
in darkness rather than in light. 

October 5. 

We have admitted that he who knows not God 
may not be a monster ; we cannot say he will not 
be a dwarf. This precisely, and on perfectly 
natural principles, is what he must be. You can 
dwarf a soul just as you can dwarf a plant, by 
depriving it of a full environment. Such a soul 
for a time may have " a name to live/' Its char- 
acter may betray no sign of atrophy. But its 
very virtue somehow has the pallor of a flower 



l6o SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

that is grown in darkness, or as the herb which 
has never seen the sun, no fragrance breathes 
from its spirit. To morality, possibly, this or- 
ganism offers the example of an irreproachable 
life ; but to science it is an instance of arrested 
development ; and to religion it presents the 
spectacle of a corpse — a living Death. With 
Ruskin, "I do not wonder at what men suffer, 
but I wonder often at what they lose." 

October 6. 

The soul, in its highest sense, is a vast capacity 
for God. It is like a curious chamber added on 
to being, and somehow involving being, a cham- 
ber with elastic and contractile walls, which can 
be expanded, with God as its guest, inimitably, 
but which without God shrinks and shrivels until 
every vestige of the Divine is gone, and God's 
image is left without God's Spirit. One cannot 
call what is left a soul ; it is a shrunken, useless 
organ, a capacity sentenced to death by disuse. 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. l6l 

Nature has her revenge upon neglect as well as 
upon extravagance. Misuse, with her, is as mor- 
tal a sin as abuse. 

October 7. 

I say that man believes in a God, who feels 
himself in the presence of a Power which is not 
himself, and is immeasurably above himself, a 
Power in the contemplation of which he is ab- 
sorbed, in the knowledge of which he finds safety 
and happiness. 

October 8. 

Sin is simply apostasy from God, unbelief in 
God. " Sin is manifest in its true character when 
the demand of holiness in the conscience, pre- 
senting itself to the man as one of loving submis- 
sion to God, is put from him with aversion. Here 
sin appears as it really is, a turning away from 
God; and while the man's guilt is enhanced, 
there ensues a benumbing of the heart resulting 
from the crushing of those higher impulses. This 



1 62 SELECTIONS EROM DRUMMOND. 

is what is meant by the reprobate state of those 
who reject Christ and will not believe the Gospel, 
so often spoken of in the New Testament ; this 
unbelief is just the closing of the heart against the 
highest love. ' ' 

October 9. 

If sin is estrangement from God, this very es- 
trangement is Death. It is a want of correspond- 
ence. If sin is selfishness, it is conducted at the 
expense of life. Its wages are Death — ' ' he that 
loveth his life," said Christ, " shall lose it." 

October 10. 

This law, which is true for the whole plant- 
world, is also valid for the animal and for man. 
Air is not life, but corruption— so literally cor- 
ruption that the only way to keep out corruption, 
when life has ebbed, is to keep out air. Life is 
merely a temporary suspension of these destruct- 
ive powers ; and this is truly one of the most ac- 
curate definitions of life we have yet received — 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 63 

"the sum total of the functions which resist 
death." 

Spiritual life, in like manner, is the sum total 
of the functions which resist sin. The soul's at- 
mosphere is the daily trial, circumstance, and 
temptation of the world. And as it is life alone 
which gives the plant power to utilize the ele- 
ments, and as, without it, they utilize it, so it is 
the spiritual life alone which gives the soul power 
to utilize temptation and trial ; and without it 
they destroy the soul. How shall be escape if we 
refuse to exercise these functions — in other words, 
if we neglect ? * 

October u. 

To correspond with the God of Science, the 
Eternal Unknowable, would be everlasting exist- 
ence; to correspond with "the true God and 
Jesus Christ/ ' is Eternal Life. The quality of the 
Eternal Life alone makes the heaven ; mere ever- 
lastingness might be no boon. Even the brief 
span of the temporal life is too long for those who 



164 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

spend its years in sorrow. Time itself, let alone 
Eternity, is all but excruciating to Doubt. And 
many besides Schopenhauer have secretly regarded 
consciousness as the hideous mistake and malady 
of Nature. Therefore we must not only have 
quantity of years, to speak in the language of the 
present, but quality of correspondence. When 
we leave Science behind, this correspondence also 
receives a higher name. It becomes communion. 
Other names there are for it, religious and theo- 
logical. It may be included in a general expres- 
sion, Faith ; or we may call it by a personal and 
specific term, Love. 

October 12. 

The punishment of sin is inseparably bound 
up with itself. To refuse to deny one's self is just 
to be left with the self undenied. The discipline 
of life was meant to destroy this self, but that dis- 
cipline having been evaded, its purpose is balked. 
But the soul is the loser. In seeking to gain its 



SEI,ECTlOKS FROM DRUMMONHD. 165 

life it has really lost it. This is what Christ meant 
when He said : " He that loveth his life shall lose 
it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall 
keep it unto life eternal." 

October 13. 

No truth of Christianity has been more ignor- 
antly or wilfully travestied than the doctrine of 
Immortality. The popular idea, in spite of a hun- 
dred protests, is that Eternal Life is to live for- 
ever. A single glance at the locus classicus, might 
have made this error impossible. There we are 
told that Life Eternal is not to live. This is Life 
Eternal — to know. 

October 14. 

The well-defined spiritual life is not only the 
highest life, but its is also the most easily lived. 
The whole cross is more easily carried than the 
half. It is the man who tries to make the best 
of both worlds who makes nothing of either. 
13 



1 66 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

And he who seeks to serve two masters misses the 
benediction of both. But he who has taken his 
stand, who has drawn a boundary line, sharp and 
deep about his religious life, who has marked off 
all beyond as forever forbidden ground to him, 
finds the yoke easy and the burden light. 

October 15. 

My thoughts of what is manly, and noble, and 
pure, have almost all of them arisen from the 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

October 16. 

The creation of a new heart, the renewing of a 
right spirit, is an omnipotent work of God. 
Leave it to the Creator. " He which hath began a 
good work in you will perfect it unto that day. ' ' 

October 17. 

The one thing which Christianity tries to ex- 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 67 

tirpate from a man's nature is selfishness, even 
though it be the losing of his own soul. 

October 18. 

We can only see a very little bit at a time ; 
and we must, I think, learn to believe that other 
men can see bits of truth as well, as ourselves. 

October 19. 

It is only one of the aims of Christianity to 
make the best men. The next thing Christ wants 
to do is to make the best world. And He tries 
to make the best world by setting the best men 
loose upon the world to influence it and reflect 
Him upon it. 

October 20. 

Friendship is the nearest thing we know to 
what religion is. God is love. And to make 
religion akin to Friendship is simply to give it 
the highest expression conceivable by man. 



1 68 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

October 21. 

Thorough Bible study is of such importance. 
We can get to the bottom of truth in itself, and 
be able to give a reason for the faith that is in us. 

October 22. 

All my conceptions of the progress of grace in 
the soul ; all the steps by which the divine life is 
evolved ; all the ideals that overhang the blessed 
sphere which awaits us beyond this world — these 
are derived from the Saviour. The life that I 
now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son 
of God. 

October 23. 

Live in peace and harmony and brotherliness 

with every one. 

1 

October 24. 

Christ is the Light of the world, and much of 
His Light is reflected from things in the world. 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 69 

October 25. 

It is when drawing near the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and longing to be loved, that I have 
the most vivid sense of unsymmetry, of imper- 
fection, of absolute unworthiness, and of my 
sinfulness. Character and conduct are never so 
vividly set before me as when in silence I bend 
in the presence of Christ, revealed not in wrath, 
but in the love to me. I never so much long to 
be lovely, that I may be loved, as when I have 
this revelation or Christ before my mind. 

October 26. 

Christ shines through men, through books, 
through history, through nature, music, art. 
Look for Him there. 

October 27. 

Heredity and Environment are the master- 
influences of the organic world. These have 



170 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

made all of us what we are. These forces are still 
ceaselessly playing upon all our lives. And he 
who truly understands these influences ; he who 
has decided how much to allow to each ; he who 
can regulate new forces as they arise, or adjust 
them to the old, so directing them as at one 
moment to make them co-operate, at another to 
counteract one another, understands the rationale 
of personal development. To seize continuously 
the opportunity of more and more perfect adjust- 
ment to better and higher conditions, to balance 
some inward evil with some purer influence acting 
from without, in a word to make our Environ- 
ment at the same time that it is making us — these 
are the secrets of a well-ordered and successful 
life. 

October 28, 

I have had a hunger to be loved of Christ. You 
all know, in some relations, what it is to be hun- 
gry for love. Your heart seems unsatisfied until 
you can draw something more toward you from 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 171 

those that are dearest to you. There have been 
times when I have had an unspeakable heart- 
hunger for Christ's love. 

October 29. 

The cardinal error in the religious life is to 
attempt to live without an environment. Spirit- 
ual experience occupies itself, not too much, but 
too exclusively, with one factor — the soul. We 
delight in dissecting this much tortured faculty, 
from time to time, in search of a certain some- 
thing which we call our faith — forgetting that 
faith is but an attitude, an empty Hand for grasp- 
ing an environing Presence. 

October 30. 

Why do we seek to breathe without an atmos- 
phere, to drink without a well ? Why this unsci- 
entific attempt to sustain life for weeks at a time 
without an Environment ? It is because we have 
never truly seen the necessity for an Environment. 



172 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

We have not been working with a principle. We 
are told to " wait only upon God/' but we do 
not know why. It has never been as clear to us 
that without God the soul will die as that without 
food the body will perish. 

October 31. 

"As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself ex- 
cept it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except 
ye abide in Me." The word here, it will be ob- 
served again, is cannot. It is the imperative of 
natural law. Fruit-bearing without Christ is not 
an improbability, but an impossibility. As well 
expect the natural fruit to flourish without air and 
heat, without soil and sunshine. 

November 1. 

Whatever energy the soul expands must first be 
"taken into it from without/ ' We are not Crea- 
tors, but creatures ; God is our refuge and 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 73 

strength. Communion with God, therefore, is a 
scientific necessity ; and nothing will more help 
the defeated spirit which is struggling in the 
wreck of its religious life than a common-sense 
hold of this plain biological principle that without 
Environment he can do nothing. 

November 2. 

Nature is not more natural to my body than 
God is to my soul. Every animal and plant has 
its own Environment. And the further one in- 
quires into the relations of the one to the other, 
the more one sees the marvellous intricacy and 
beauty of the adjustments. 

November 3. 

The psalmist's " God is our refuge and 
strength" is only the earlier form, less defined, 
less practicable, but not less noble, of Christ's 
" Come unto Me, and I will give you rest." 



174 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

November 4. 

The Life of the Senses, high and low, may 
perfect itself in Nature. Even the Life of 
thought may find a large complement in sur- 
rounding things. But the higher thought, and 
the conscience, and the religious Life, can only 
perfect themselves in God. 

November 5. 

The New Testament is nowhere more impres- 
sive than where it insists on the fact of man's 
independence. In its view the first step in re- 
ligion is for man to feel his helplessness. Christ's 
first beatitude is to the poor in spirit. 

November 6. 

It is easier to criticise the best thing superbly 
than to do the smallest thing indifferently. 

November 7. 
"An idle life," says Goethe, "is death an- 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 175 

ticipated. ,, Better far be burned at the stake of 
Public Opinion than die the living death of 
Parasitism. Better an aberrant theology than a 
suppressed organization. Better a little faith 
dearly won, better launched alone on the infinite 
bewilderment of Truth, than perish on the 
splendid plenty of the richest creeds. 

November 8. 

Who is to help these people ? No one can lift 
them up in any way except those who are living 
the life of Christ, and it is their privilege and 
business to bind up the broken-hearted. 

November 9. 

The most obvious lesson in Chrises teaching 
is that there is no happiness in having and getting 
anything, but only in giving. 

November 10. 

It is not a strange thing, then, for the soul to 



I76 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

find its life in God. This is its native air. God 
as the Environment of the soul has been from the 
remotest age the doctrine of all the deepest 
thinkers in religion. And long before it was 
possible for religion to give scientific expression 
to its greatest truths, men of insight uttered 
themselves in psalms which could not have been 
truer to Nature had the most modern light con- 
trolled the inspiration. "As the hart panteth 
after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after 
Thee, O God." 

November 11. 

Our companionship with Him, like all true 
companionship, is a spiritual communion. All 
friendship, all love, human and Divine, is purely 
spiritual. 

November 12. 

There is no more important lesson that we 
have to carry with us than that truth is not to be 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 177 

found in what I have been taught. That is not 
truth. Truth is not what I have been taught. 

November 13. 

Theology is the most abstruse thing in the 
world, but practical religion is the simplest thing. 

November 14. 

You will find as you look back upon your life 
that the moments that stand out, the moments 
when you have really lived, are the moments 
when you have done things in a spirit of love. 

November 15. 

Religion is not a strange or added thing, but 
the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing 
of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. 

November 16. 

If the Christian is to " live . unto God, ' ' he 



178 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

must " die unto sin. M If he does not kill sin, 
sin will inevitably kill him. 

November 17. 

The entire dependence of the soul upon God 
is not an exceptional mystery, nor is man's help- 
lessness an arbitrary and unprecedented phenom- 
enon. It is the law of all Nature. 

November 18. 

To become like Christ is the only thing in the 
world worth caring for, the thing before which 
every ambition of man is folly, and all lower 
achievement vain. 

November 19. 

The highest and manliest character that ever 
lived was Christ. 

November 20. 

Religion must ripen its fruit for every tempera- 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 79 

ment ; and the way even unto its highest heights 
must be by a gateway through which the peoples 
of the world may pass. 

November ax. 

It is the beautiful work of Christianity every- 
where to adjust the burden of life to those who 
bear it, and them to it. 

November 22. 

For a few short hours you live the Eternal Life. 
The eternal life, the life of faith, is simply the 
life of the higher vision. 

November 23. 

Patience ; kindness ; generosity ; humility ; 
courtesy ; unselfishness ; good temper ; guileless- 
ness ; sincerity- — these make up the supreme gift, 
the stature of the perfect man. 

November 24. 
Every hour a kingdom is coming in your heart, 



1 80 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

in your home, in the world near you, be it a 
kingdom of darkness or a kingdom of light. 

November 25. 

It is the Law of Influence that we become like 
those whom we habitually admire. 

November 26. 

A man's Christianity does not consist in merely 
his own soul, but in sanctifying and purifying the 
lives of his fellow-men. 

November 27. 

Stupendous victory and mystery of regenera- 
tion that mortal man should suggest to the world, 
God! 

November 28. 

The Spiritual Life is the gift of the Living 
Spirit. The spiritual man is no mere development 
of the natural man. He is a new creation born 
from above. 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. l8r 

November 29. 

Faith is an attitude — a mirror set at the right 
angle. 

November 30. 

The Christian life is the only life that will ever 
be completed. Apart from Christ the life of man 
is a broken pillar, the race of men an unfinished 
pyramid. One by one, in sight of Eternity, all 
human Ideals fall short ; one by one, before the 
open grave all human hopes dissolve. The Lau- 
reate sees a moment's light in Nature's jealousy 
for the Type ; but that too vanishes. 

" ' So careful of the type ? ' but no 

From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
She cries, ' A thousand types are gone; 
I care for nothing, all shall go." 

All shall go ? No, one Type remains. " Whom 

He 3 did foreknow He did also predestinate to be 

conformed to the Image of His Son.'' And 

" when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then 

shall ye also appear with Him in glory. * ' 
14 



1 82 SELECTIONS EROM DRUMMOND. 

December i. 

No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of 
gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un- 
Christianize society than evil temper. 

December 2. 

To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to 
influence or elevate others, we shall soon see that 
success is in proportion to their belief of our 
belief in them. 

December 3. 

My sense of sin is never strong w T hen I think 
of the law ; my sense of sin is strong when I 
think of love. 

December 4. 

No fever can attack a perfectly sound body ; no 
fever of unrest can disturb a soul which has 
breathed the air or learned the ways of Christ. 

December 5. 

You can take nothing greater to the world than 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 183 

the impress and reflection of the Love of God 
upon your own character 

December 6. 

Sanctity is in character, and not in moods ; 
Divinity in our own plain calm humanity, and in 
no mystic rapture of the soul. 

December 7. 
Christian men are the salt of the earth in the 
most literal sense. They, and they alone, keep 
the world from utter destruction. 

December 8. 

Paul tells us that if we live in Christ we are 
changed into His image. All that a man has to 
do, then, to be like Christ, is simply to live in 
friendship with Christ, and the character follows. 

December 9. 

Character is to wear forever ; who will wonder 
or grudge that it cannot be developed in a day ? 



1 84 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

December 10. 

We can make no progress without the full use 
of all the intellectual powers that God has en- 
dowed us with. 

December n. 

For more than twenty-five years I instinctively 
have gone to Christ to draw a measure and a rule 
for everything. 

December 12. 

The Bible is a product of religion, not a cause 
of it. 

December 13. 

Every character has an inward spring, let 
Christ be it. Every action has a key-note, let 
Christ set it. 

December 14. 

Whatever rest is provided by Christianity for 
the children of God, it is certainly never con- 
templated that it should supersede personal effort. 
And any rest which ministers to indifference is 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 185 

immoral and unreal — it makes parasites and not 
men. Just because God worketh in him, as the 
evidence and triumph of it, the true child of God 
works out his own salvation — works it out having 
really received it — not as a light thing, a super- 
fluous labor, but with fear and trembling as a 
reasonable and indispensable service. 

December 15. 

Faith is never opposed to reason in the New 
Testament, but to sight. 

December 16. 

Nothing that happens in the world happens by 

chance. * 

December 17. 

Above all, let us remember to hold the truth in 

love. That is the most sanctifying influence of 

all. 

December 18. 

In will-power, in mere spasms of earnestness 
there is no salvation. 



1 86 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

December ig. 

Reflect the character of Christ, and you will 
become like Christ. 

December 20. 

Death to the lower self, is the nearest gate and 
the quickest road to life. 

December 21. 

Whatever else Christ claimed to be or to do, 
He at least knew how to live. 

December 22. 

Suppose now it be granted for a moment that 
the character of the not-a-Christian is as beautiful 
as that of the Christian. This is simply to say 
that the crystal is as beautiful as the organism. 
One is quite entitled to hold this ; but what he 
is not entitled to hold is that both in the same 
sense are living. He that hath the Son hath Life, 
and he that hath not the Son of God hath not Life* 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 87 

And in the face of this law, no other conclusion 
is possible than that that which is flesh remains 
flesh. No matter how great the development of 
beauty, that which is flesh is withal flesh. The 
elaborateness or the perfection of the moral de- 
velopment in any given instance can do nothing 
to break down this distinction. 

December 23. 

Mark well the splendor of this idea of salvation. 
It is not merely final " safety/' to be forgiven sin, 
to evade the curse. It is not, vaguely, "to get 
to heaven.' ' It is to be conformed to the Image 
of the Son. It is for these poor elements to 
attain to the Supreme Beauty. The organizing 
Life being Eternal, so must this Beauty be im- 
mortal. Its progress towards the Immaculate is 
already guaranteed. And more than all there is 
here fulfilled the sublimest of all prophecies ; not 
Beauty alone but Unity is secured by the Type — 
Unity of man and man, God and man, God and 
Christ and man, till "all shall be one." 



1 88 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

December 24. 

Yet this is what Christianity is for — to teach 
men the Art of Life, And its whole curriculum 
lies in one word — " Learn of Me," 

December 25. 

Live after Christ, in His Spirit, as in His Pres- 
ence, and it is difficult to think what more you 
can do. 

December 26. 

After all, the best test for Life is just living. 
And living consists, as we have formerly seen, in 
corresponding with Environment. Those there- 
fore who find within themselves, and regularly 
exercise, the faculties for corresponding with the 
Divine Environment, may be said to live the 
Spiritual Life. 

December 27. 

The inward nature must develop out according 
to its Type, until the consummation of oneness 
with God is reached. 



SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 1 89 

December 28. 

O preposterous and vain man, thou who could- 
est not make a finger nail of thy body, thinkest 
thou to fashion this wonderful, mysterious, subtle 
soul of thine after the ineffable Image? Wilt 
thou ever permit thyself to be conformed to the 
Image of the Son ? Wilt thou, who canst not 
add a cubit to thy stature, submit to be raised by 
the Type-Life within thee to the perfect stature 
of Christ ? 

December 29. 

If to live with men, diluted to the millionth 
degree with the virtue of the Highest, can exalt 
and purify the nature, what bounds can be set to 
the influence of Christ ? 

December 30. 

The recognition of the Ideal is the first step in 
the direction of Conformity. But let it be clearly 
observed that it is but a step. There is no vital 
connection between merely seeing the Ideal and 



I90 SELECTIONS FROM DRUMMOND. 

being conformed to it. Thousands admire Christ 
who never become Christians. 

December 31. 

The work begun by Nature is finished by the 
Supernatural — as we are wont to call the higher 
natural. And as the veil is lifted by Christianity 
it strikes men dumb with wonder. For the goal 
of Evolution is Jesus Christ. 



H 29 82 




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